Nice of them to cover a few from the last few years as well. From a school standpoint, this is a big win. I doubt many chromebooks in active use by students would even last 10 years.
> For Chromebooks released before 2021 and already in use, users and IT admins will have the option to extend automatic updates to 10 years from the platform’s release (after they receive their last automatic update).
I don't entirely understand why the 2021 cutoff for it being opt-in vs. opt-out is there. Maybe it's about the "already in use" bit somehow, and making sure that pre-2021 models don't continue being manufactured and sold as as new.
My Pixelbook doesn't get much use anymore vs my M1 MacBook but it's nice to know it will still be supported. It can be a handy thin client and I don't have to worry as much about it getting stolen/abusing at this point in its life.
[1] https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?visit_id=...
HW might also be more standarized today, e.g. using USB internally for webcam and keyboard.
> For devices prior to 2021 that will receive extended updates, some features and services may not be supported.
So.. they might need to rip out some problematic drivers, maybe? Like, imagine the bluetooth chip vendor not being cooperative, you get to choose to continue updates but losing bluetooth as a feature.
The footnote continues
> See our Help Center for details.
So kudos to first one dig out the exact page they're referring to (there's no link).
> ** For devices prior to 2021 that will receive extended updates, some features and services might not be supported.
which doesn't really say anything...
no, then you tell them that if they dont play ball, they will NEVER sell a single chip to anything google ever again, and then you hire some people to reverse engineer the shit, and make it work anyway. And then you publish all about how company X is being stupid and trying to work against efforts to save the environment, how they are trying very hard to make money on peoples hardware being obsoleted before time etc.
But then we realize that google themselves have bummed out to large extents with what they have permitted on android and chromebooks, so anything like this would not happen
Imagine that the part you want (given the constraints, etc.) has maybe two suppliers. You pick one of them and use them in your product. Then they drop support and you pull this stunt. What do you think will happen? People will storm the company with pitchforks and they'll quietly release their full source code and promise to never do that ever again?
No, what's actually going to happen is you're going to write a blog post, Hacker News is going to be like "yeah I worked with that supplier once, never again" and the average consumer is going to be like "who is this company?" and it will be forgotten by next week. Your reverse engineered drivers, which you of course spent millions of dollars on hiring top-tier engineers to make, will ship and the company will immediately sue you for infringement. Maybe if you did a very careful job you might be able to claim some sort of interoperatability defense and win the case years from now. Before then the court will grant an injunction preventing the sale of your device.
There's no need to tell the supplier that you will never work with them again. You've ruined the relationship already. And the other supplier? They probably won't work with you either, because they're doing the same thing and would like to keep doing it, thank you very much. Oh, you think you're Google so people will care about your business? They're selling 10x the volume to Samsung for their smart fridges. And now you get to I guess create an entire division to create a Bluetooth chip from scratch. By the way leadership wants to ship Pixel 9 on time so can you please have it ready by December? And it needs to support all the latest features because it would truly suck if Apple shipped Bluetooth 6.5 support before we did.
are you saying for real that google isnt big enough to get its way with these things? they could buy these puny suppliers, piss on every desk in their offices, and close them down, just for fun if they so wanted.
and how come this "sued into oblivion" doesnt happen when the community writes drivers for linux in the cases where vendors do not play ball? are you saying theres absolutely no way google could pay money to make this happen?
get real
The way companies express their pique is that they try to aggressively poach engineers from the company to make their own in-house team, in a process that frequently takes years. All the time they continue buying chips because until that is complete they don’t actually have any Bluetooth chips to ship in their products. Even then the process frequently doesn’t work because it turns out that throwing a billion dollars at something doesn’t necessarily mean you can make what the other company has spent 25 years on. If you want examples, just look at Apple: they aggressively pull things they think are strategic into their own hardware team, and they still talk to a bunch of terrible suppliers because they aren’t willing to shell out the money to do it themselves and they don’t consider it worth going to war over. And the things that they do actually try to make (modems, for example) frequently don’t work out.
Nobody is going to sue a guy in his basement working on Linux drivers. You can scare him with lawyers but fundamentally there’s not much that you can extract from them. But going after Google for IP infringement in a phone that sold ten million units is actually very much worth it.
I think you feel that Google has infinite money to just use on tantrums and despite them having a lot of money their is probably no entity on earth that can engage in these kinds of things regularly and get away with it. Companies are not like people. Even the smallest ones have legal teams that can make engaging with them very painful. And in hardware people have a ton of options to sell to, so you’re just a tiny piece of anyone’s pie.
Google could EASILY do this, they just do not care. Nobody would come after them if they reverse engineered drivers for bluetooth chips.
but it would never come to that, they could just announce that bluetooth drivers now have to be open source to quality for play store shit, and it would be done. they have 1 million ways to get what they care about, they just dont
my spidey-sense is telling me that a giant megacompany that dwarfs bluetooth companies could probably manage to solve this, and easily at that
It can no doubt solve it cheaper, but it can for sure solve it
Sure, if you could set the Wayback machine back in time, and require that device driver be upstreamed, with enough programming information so it's possible to maintain the device driver, maybe it would be possible to upgrade to a newer kernel that doesn't have eleven hundred zero-day vulnerabilities. But meanwhile, back in the real world, very often there's not a whole lot you can do. So this is why it's kind of sad when people insist on buying Nvidia video chips that have proprietary blobs because performance, or power consumption, or whatever, instead of the more boring alternative that doesn't have the same eye-bleeding performance, but which has an open source device driver. Our buying choices, and the product reviewers that only consider performance, or battery life, etc., drives the supply chain, and the products that we get. And this is why we can't have nice things.
It would be better if Google defaults to supporting 2020, 2019 (Many purchased in 2020 were manufactured in 2019).
The second sentenxe doesn't follow the first - it's a flavor of Zeno's paradox, after 5 years, you'll be left with 4/5 x 4/5 x 4/5 x 4/5 x 4/5 of the original batch.
And anyway, if 1/5 of laptops needed major repairs and some of them got it, those go back into circulation. Are they still original laptops? (Ask my grandfather's axe...)
You made a mistake: it's not that 1/5 of the computers spontaneously break every year. It's that 1/5 of the students treat their computers roughly.
Assuming that laptops get collected over the summer and re-distributed each year, you should actually expect that 100% of each tranche of laptops would need to be replaced every 5 years.
That's fair. I guess, it's more accurate to say that you'd expect a number of laptops equal to the size of the initial tranche to be destroyed after the first 5 years.
Although if I was running IT, it'd definitely keep track of the "destructive" students and issue them the oldest equipment, in which case, we'd be back to something closer to my original statement.
You absolutely could design it to last 20 years with batteries that are easy to pop out and pop in as easy as changing a double aa but your customers won't pay a premium over a more disposable machine and indeed if your customer has a good experience over the 3-5 they actually use it for you make MORE if your hardware is designed to need replacement.
Anyway, it doesn't matter much either way, even if there's a few that survive, they will be having wear and tear to the point you wouldn't want another student to have them (or maybe as a replacement for a broken one); you wouldn't want some year 1 students to get a new ones while others get the year 4/5 leftovers, they'll resent it for sure.
Second, they'll be paid off after a few years.
It's not the case that there's a constant 1/5 probability of failure each year. Many failure modes are based on cumulative stress/degradation; so the probability of failure can go up over time.
Some failure modes go down over time; maybe there's some manufacturing defect, and those that have the defect fail early, while those that survive past the first year will have lower chances of failure early on.
But in this kind of environment, the cumulative stresses are much more likely than the early failures.
I've seen an explosion of online homework recently and it's all confusing and either way to easy or waaayyyy too hard with very little of the partial credit and recourse that an actual person grading a paper assignment has.
The only thing that really works are repeated reminders and attentive consequences, over a sustained period of time.
Also, adults don't typically have coworkers grab their laptop and smash it because they're disliked.
The sorts of kids with laptop issues were not the children with high parent involvement.
Wait to see what happens to devices made of glass !
Jest aside, any device lasting even two or three years in a school environment is kinda of a big deal given the daily abuse it will get.
Do you believe a Mac or Windows laptop would have been more reliable given the abuse they were subjected to?
Removing student access to technology is overly punitive and does not support the intended learning and development outcomes of attending school.
To ostracize a child because they damaged their laptop is psychological abuse.
We can just help them take better care of it and reinforce the reasons why and train them to do so! :-)
I see adults with absolute garbage looking iPhones. Some people just do not care. Others do. There is some amount of 'psychological' you can do to fix some of it. But at the end of the day you will have a mix of 'sorta broke', 'broken', 'did you ever take it out of the box'.
Then on top of that. There is a level of junk products. I have a high end laptop I absolutely baby. That thing is a piece of rubish and in a year or so I am going to gladly get rid of it. It has major defects ~2 years in. The previous 3 laptops I had were in very good condition for 5+ years each until the plastic literally started detreating. The same ODM's making that laptop are also making chromebooks. My only option to fix this is by buying used parts of sites like ebay. Or be without my primary computer for 4-8 weeks. Chromebooks margins have to be decently thin or they would not sell them that cheap. Which probably means the things are kind of junk too.
A big issue with chromebooks in particular: there's many discreet models of different sizes and builds, that all require different parts, and don't get renewed every year.
One school ordering 400 12" HP chromebooks for instance will have no guarantee to be able to order another batch 2 years later, even of an equivalent machine that could be a straight replacement.
Perhaps Dell has a more stable offering given they probably understand these problematics better ?
They have like 5 different saas programs/platforms they use. They also have video platforms. Reading, library checkout, digital media, quizzes, tests, who knows.
If I was a kid without add, I would for sure have it having to use that stuff at 11 years old.
I'm not sure who thought doing away with pen and paper and a simple book in front of you was a good idea.
I assume it was an IT/software salesperson with ability to give kickbacks.
> I doubt many chromebooks in active use by students would even last 10 years.
Kind of like Adobe did with easy piracy of Photoshop during the early versions.
Ubiquity is it’s own reward.
That's what I keep coming back to. I've known two classes of Chromebook, shelved and about to be.
Most of my customers tried them. It seemed reasonable their office could use them for light web app use. Every one was in the closet within 6 months.
They're commonly slow. Printer support is a crapshoot, MFP doubly so. Corporate plugin support is a crapshoot. Whatever unforeseen new computing experience arrives, they probably can't do it.
I was at my mechanic's shop last month. He stopped mid sentence to say 'I hate this thing; I'm about to throw it thru a wall' while he's trying to lookup parts online. It's an Acer Chromebook and will likely be gone by my next visit.
Hopefully this announcement will put some pressure on Apple to do the same.
My iPhone 8 is still supported by the current iOS (no longer by 17, womp womp.) It's nearly seven years old, is still on its first battery with about 79% capacity left and it hasn't gone into brownout-prevention mode yet. I'm figuring that with the new iOS release it probably won't be supported, but who knows.
A few whiz-bang features aren't supported; fancy but kinda useless webcam stuff, and newer iPhones can do more extensive object recognition in photos like bugs and plants that I think my phone won't do.
I'm not missing much aside from better cellular band support, which is kind of a wash because my phone has a qualcomm modem and Apple's switch to intel modems didn't go well.
Even the newer cameras aren't tempting because a generation or two after the 8 and X, they all became inflicted with Apple's horrifically bad "AI" image processing that makes everything look like a watercolor painting.
They have for phones but I think they could do better when it comes to the computers.
Also it would be nice to have a formal statement of what their intentions are.
As an example I have no idea how long my four year old Mac Mini will continue to get updates for.
Apple provides security updates for the prior two releases, which means that damn near any Mac made in the last ten years, even without Opencore Legacy, is still receiving security updates.
My 2013 Macbook Pro will run the current MacOS release with Opencore Legacy. That's a now-ten-year-old computer running the current OS release.
Anyone who uses their computer for a significant period of time, and especially to make money, who does not upgrade more quickly than every ten years, isn't very smart. It doesn't take long, waiting for your computer every day, before it's costing you more in lost productivity than it would be to replace it with something newer, especially if you buy used.
Claiming that a ten year old laptop, Apple or otherwise, is "perfectly usable" is a joke by people who clearly haven't spent any appreciable time using current hardware, which is by every single measure enormously better.
For phones and tablets, sure. For desktops/laptops, Linux outdoes them handily. My mid-2012 MacBook Pro can run Catalina at the latest, which has been outdated for several years and unsupported since last year. But I can still install a current Linux distro on a machine of that era just fine.
The only valid comparison is versus Windows, because only Windows has similar capabilities and user experience.
Zero issues, I just had to migrate to Linux to get OS updates. It has pretty damn good reliability.
Hardware can last pretty long, it is wasteful not to bother releasing software updates.
``` The company currently guarantees eight years of automatic updates to Chromebooks. That period, however, begins at the time when the company certifies a Chromebook, not when it’s actually in the owner’s hands. Because of the time it takes schools and businesses to purchase, receive, set up, and deploy new fleets of computers, they commonly end up getting four to five years of use out of them in practice. ```
so this is really about ensuring that the laptops actually get 5 years of use before needing to be replaced.
If you expect to lose 20% of laptops each year, after a decade, about 10% of laptops will still work after a decade. It's more if you are willing to work around issues (e.g. epoxy a crack or replace a part).
It's crappy if you need to toss otherwise good computers purely due to a software issue.
Failures are random and infrequent if you start with good hardware. Sadly, in my experience a lot of cheap laptops do not come with reliable hardware.
For example, if you buy Lenovo, the Idea* laptops will be junk laptops, while Think* will be pretty good quality. There are sub-grades within both. With Dell, there are usually several series with names changing periodically. In the Latitude series, the first number corresponded to quality when I last bought. 3xxx is junk. 5xxx is decent. 7xxx is good. There are similar divisions in their consumer lines.
It's possible to find very good reliable laptops if you're willing to live with last years' model, and especially with off-lease premium laptops. Corporate environments will often lease a thousand premium laptops for three years, not stress them very hard, and then they're sold for a song as there's a corporate-wide refresh.
You wouldn't? I have an X230 and it still works fine/is perfectly usable, and that's over 10 years old at this point. Why would you not expect a laptop to last more than 10 years?
(And yes, I know what the real answer is - they bought bargain bin laptops like 4-6 years after RTM, so they only have like 2-4 years of actual wear and tear on them. Given their carelessness the first time, I wouldn't rule out a repeat in 2 years).
I got an Acer Chromebook C720 in 2013ish, and the dual-core Celeron 2955U (Haswell) with 4GB of RAM is still ok. The touchpad stopped working in mine, and I dunno how bad the battery is, and I installed FreeBSD for fun after ChromeOS stopped updating, but I bet it'd run ChromeOS Flex no problem. It doesn't have the virtualization extension needed to run Android apps (not part of ChromeOS Flex anyway), but I don't think there's anything else missing really.
I'll probably install ChromeOS Flex on my Lenovo ThinkPad 13 Chromebook after I let the final official OS update simmer a bit more (it's a pain to get to the firmware write protect screw), it's a much nicer case and a little bit newer processor, but otherwise pretty close to the Acer one; and the touch pad still works. OTOH, I don't think I can change out the storage and as I mentioned the write protect screw is hard to access.
I have several other laptops from 2011 which are even weaker (One with I5-560M (upgraded from 380M for 6$) and other with I3-2310M) and they are also mostly fine for web browsing and office, and capable of playing 1080p YouTube video even without hardware acceleration (they don't have VP9 decoding),with H264ify CPU usage drops to 30-40 percents.
With progress in semiconductors slowing down i would expect laptops to last even longer, but with manufactures soldering down RAM and sometimes even SSD maybe that won't be the case. Cause if i wouldn't be able to replaces HHD with SSD and upgrade RAM on these old laptops they would be garbage long time ago.
I’m not sure I’ll ever really need to replace my M1. I could technically still work on the pro, and I mostly got the M1 because of hype, but I really don’t see what is going to increase my systems requirements in the next 20 years to be beyond what the m1 is currently doing. Maybe if I start doing more compiling on it instead of in the cloud? But I really think we’re at the point where it’ll physically break before the spec become obsolete, or alternatively, that it’ll stop getting updates from Apple. At which point I guess it can just live on with Linux.
It got ssd and battery replacements + memory upgrade though.
It's not useful for very much, since it's way underpowered for most things you might want to do today, but it still works for typing and basic networking.
I was shift lead for a SIEM team when lockdown started and the number of 2009-2011 era machines that got pulled out of a closet and brought online when remote work started was staggering.
This wasn't the case in 20-25 years ago when stuff would outdate real fast. 90% of people don't really need new computers.