What laptops are we seriously expecting to last more than 10 years? I wouldn't expect that from a MacBook Pro or a Thinkpad, let alone a $300 Chromebook.
I have several other laptops from 2011 which are even weaker (One with I5-560M (upgraded from 380M for 6$) 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
``` 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.
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.
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.
(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).
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.
It got ssd and battery replacements + memory upgrade though.