To be completely clear, I think this sort of short expiry for devices is bullshit. BUT
But, it was completely predictable thing, the schools knew perfectly well that they would expire. Saying that the expiry "jeopardizes students’ educations" is straight out dishonest when its just poor planning that is jeopardizing anything. This feels bit like people buying disposable cameras and then complaining that they can't change film on them. Yes, the expiry on Chromebooks is bit more arbitrary. But nevertheless it was something that would have been very clear if they did basic due diligence when purchasing the devices.
Yes, the expiry on Chromebooks is bit more arbitrary
It honestly isn’t. Chromebooks are very shoddily built. I have seen tons of them fail long before the end of the support window. Disposable cameras are a much more apt comparison than you realized.
What does hardware build quality (which varies between chromebook models, the expensive ones are very sturdy) have to do with software support lifecycle?
They aren't all that bad. I have one Dell 730-8301 I bought in early 2014, and four Dell 3120 (built 2015), all still humming along no problem. They're running as servers now but for many years they saw conventional laptop duty.
Because consumers had talked after lukewarm reception from Pixel buyers.
They also removed "original quality storage" after Pixel 3, pixel 4 didn't have a fingerprint sensor in favor of face sensor (terrible idea) and 5, if I'm not mistaken, was not a flagship.
Google had a great product that was different and slowly nerfed it. Now it's just one more competitor but nothing to write home about.
They lost a lot of consumer loyalty of the users who wouldn't have ever considered an iPhone (walled garden) in the first place.
It would be a very big win for goodwill if Google built out a team that took over as much of this as possible. Just have a bunch of this hardware and try to keep these machines up to date.
The biggest problem from the outside feels like people working at Google might not be super hype about this (no I'm not talking about the "new project to get promoted" treadmill, just vibes), and really there's probably external people who are up to this.
But seriously, just figuring out how to get these to run "forever" in whatever degraded capacity is possible. At least until the hardware itself starts falling apart of course.
No degraded capacity at all; you can unlock a lot of them and install a real OS which won't limit what you can do with them. That will be a big upgrade.
I've reflashed a good number of Chromeboxes (hardware-wise they're essentially the same thing) and they now can run whatever I wish to install.
I am happy there is info on how to "liberate" these devices. The school's usecases are much more around having a locked down environment so that kids' systems can be recovered easily, and I don't know if just installing Ubuntu helps a lot with that use case.
Given enterprise environments exist though, I do feel like there must be _some_ sort of setup that could be done to get a fairly robust environment. Especially if the kid's accounts are locked down enough. Bit of an OS distro problem, but the market might be there given what we're seeing here!
Once you have a decent UEFI boot environment, I think you can install Chrome OS Flex. At that point, it's basically the same as Chrome OS, except you're missing out on boot security, which is maybe not enough for some environments, but should be good enough for many. I haven't done this yet, though. I've got an old chromebook that kind of half works (touchpad is dead) and I put FreeBSD on when I stopped using it for Chrome OS; a Chromebox that I bought to put Windows on (and now runs FreeBSD) and my current ChromeOS device just ran out of updates but is still in good shape (it's one of the ones in the list in the article); the write protect screw seems hard to get to, so I'm going to wait for the last build to be 6 months old or a scary vulnerability to come out before I take it apart.
> I am happy there is info on how to "liberate" these devices. The school's usecases are much more around having a locked down environment so that kids' systems can be recovered easily, and I don't know if just installing Ubuntu helps a lot with that use case.
I know it's not practical, but man that sounds like a hell of a cop out. But that's where we are. I feel like with school computers the focus shouldn't be on locking them down but making them easy to restore if they get screwed up. And the students who do screw their computer up should be walked through fixing it.
Actually they all should be walked through fixing it. That should be day 1 when the laptops are handed out with no OS on them.
You had a CD? We had to flip switches to install the bootloader by hand.
My security at school is: 1. Set bios password, 2. Set computer to only boot from FDE ssd, 3. Secure boot, 4. Filesystem ACL, 5. set to only run code from places users can't write to
IT professionals with a decade of experience routinely fuck up their own environments and struggle to fix it. Asking IT staff to walk thorough “fixing up” a borked Linux env (for example because some kid is half following some tutorial to get some weird thing working and in the process breaking repos) is a major ask.
Having said that… yeah what I meant really is “have an easy way to reset it all”. This is what home directory partitions and the like are for, of course!
And schools are not in the business of teaching kids how to install an OS to a laptop. There are real things to do in the world.
Imagine being a kid who does not care about computers. You are now being asked to install an OS so you can use some word processor. What?
Interested kids should have good outlets and ways to experiment (like these tech interns fixing the busted computers!), but really the point of giving kids computers is not to get them learning sysops
One time I got a bee in my bonnet about cross-grading my Ubuntu system from 32-bit to 64-bit. I blame Chris Siebenmann for linking me to the HOWTO article.
Cross-grading is not for the faint of heart. It's the worst I've ever messed up any system, personal or at work. All kinds of things broke in novel ways, and it took me about 2 weeks to put it together again, which was a miraculous event in itself. I rejoiced when X and KDE were able to start again.
And that's the price I paid to have an up-to-date system without reformatting.
In the days of standalone applications, this was quite common. Upgrade the OS, and the software would still run. Upgrade the computer, and the software may still run. (Progress was so rapid back then that 10 years of progress in hardware would cause issues with poorly coded memory checks and timers).
In the days of standalone computers, you didn't bother with upgrades at all. Developers would create new software for popular platforms a decade after their prime (think Apple II or 8088 based PCs) even though the rate of progress in hardware was beyond astonishing. Rather than maintaing what they had, schools could build upon it.
Of course, network security and applications means that it is a struggle to maintain what you have on a budget. Artificially obsoleting hardware only make matters worse.
tbqh, since these are all chromebooks, "Does this run Chrome" covers a hell of a lot of ground.
The device management stuff is probably the big kicker, since I imagine schools can manage these machines quite easily through some Google management console.
Maybe if Google added support for machines running some Ubuntu LTS or otherwise....
Linux supports all these machines. It'd take so little for ChromeOS to keep support up. It'll be one for the history books if Google just elects to let this situation degrade.
They could show up at any time & do very little & restore public trust, make the company look good. But it sure looks like, once again, Google will just let everything go up in flames & fire. They'll make all computing look abominable, simply because the typical corporate bureaucracy doesn't even comprehend it's own hand smacking itself in the face.
I see a lot of comments about replacing the OS with Debian/Ubuntu.
I've been wondering, what's the best practice here? Let's say I have 100 Chromebooks. I imagine there's something better than walking with an USB stick to each of them, one by one. Can I push Ubuntu onto each machine, unattended, and then provision it with students accounts?
Not sure about all the models, but for the two chromebooks and the chromebox I have, you need to open the case and remove a write protect screw before you can set up standard booting, and then most of the devices don't have a network boot stack either... So, lots of labor.
Open the case, remove the screw.
Boot to chrome os, flash the uefi module and set boot config to use it by default.
Reboot from your usb drive, which hopefully does an unattended install.
If you're fancy, the usb drive could be built so you can remove it after booting... Either load the installer fs as an initrd, or configure the network and then load the installer data from the network.
It's a school - write or find a comprehensive set of instructions (for the happy path), give each student a chromebook and a blank USB, and have them do it. You get usable laptops and the students learn an important life skill - not necessarily that they memorise the instructions for next time, but that they learn what's possible.
School Chromebooks are centrally managed via MDM software [1]. Getting students to jailbreak and install Linux is a non-starter. Schools lock these devices down right to the hilt. There’s no way parents would put up with their kids having an unrestricted laptop provided by the school.
I used to manage laptops (both student Chromebooks and teacher Windows laptops) at a school, and I wouldn't even trust the teachers to be able to do this, much less students and parents.
This is surprising as it was the upstream community project for the still active Red Hat Satellite... oh well. At least there seems te be an active fork called Uyuni https://www.uyuni-project.org/
The teachers have not learned their lesson. They continue to petition a corporation instead of taking matters in their own hands.
If they wanted budget laptops, they could have bought used ones for $50 on Ebay and installed Debian. But no, they wanted some hipster hardware from an advertising company.
The petition sets a bad example for students. They learn early on that they are serfs to large corporations, who sometimes graciously react to petitions. Later they might learn that Google's only working support forum is HN ...
I've spent a lot of time out of contract installing Debian on old laptops. It was a huge time sink.
But if I were paid for my labor, it wouldn't have been the cheap way at all. I think your plan assumes that a bunch of people will do the work for free.
I also have a lot of domain expertise: more than almost anyone in my role.
they could have bought used ones for $50 on Ebay and installed Debian.
Would you care to estimate how long it would take to source even 100 working $50 laptops, install Debian on all of them, and make sure they all actually work (where "work" includes having enough battery to get through a school day)?
Plus even then you wouldn't actually get away from Google since the school probably uses gmail, Google classroom, Google Docs etc.
If those Chromebooks are same model, install and configure Debian, newest browser, etc once. Then use dd to backup internal harddrive disk image, and restore to other chromebooks. Change UUID, hostname etc with script.
Yes, because teachers are known as a well paid class of people who have loads of free time on their hands, and for who the overhead of sourcing laptops through eBay and setting up operating systems and integration with other systems from scratch is an appropriate additional workload.
In some European countries teachers are extremely well paid and have at least 2.5 months paid vacation.
The vacation seems similar in the U.S., I don't know the payments.
It students really need laptops (big if ..), the installation should happen in class. If installation cannot happen in class, the laptops are toys anyway and aren't needed. Better teach maths.
In the US, teachers are underpaid for what they do (47-69K across the whole US, COL varies greatly), pay for many supplies out of their own pocket, and do not receive salary during the vacation months, so they often take summer jobs. When not teaching classes, they are also expected to use their "free" time creating classroom plans, grading papers, coaching homework, and appeasing parents in every way.
It's a learning experience for kids. It teaches them that they are powerless to resist big companies, which prepares them for adult life as submissive consumers.
Google giveth, and Google taketh away. Blessed be the name of Google.
It's a learning experience for children: have a close and critical look at how the adults around them make personal and institutional purchasing choices.
It's a broken system that takes the environment for granted.
That said, Google offers ChromeOS Flex [1] for most devices that have reached the end of main support. I have upgraded several long-serving Chromebooks this way. They will be running for years more.
I was having a conversation with a family friend from church; he was 12 or 14 or so. He mentioned having a lot of trouble finding a Linux wireless driver for his laptop. He said he couldn't even find one on GitHub. Then I felt sorry for him, poking around on strangers' repos on GitHub for kernel-mode stuff. Who knows what you could pick up in those dark corners.
What exactly does this "Automatic Update Expiration" mean? What can't be updated after that? Is there no way to install third-party equivalents?
I asked this because for many people, me included, disabling automatic updates is the first thing they do after installing a fresh Windows. So it's a bit unclear why "Automatic Update Expiration" is a problem for someone who never owns a Chromebook.
Or you can enable Lacros and it will continue to get Chrome updates separate from the OS. Or you can install Chrome OS Flex and it will continue to get Chrome OS updates directly from Google, with no support guarantees. Or you can install Chromium OS and update it yourself.
Stop requiring proctoring spyware for taking tests. Or require one that doesn't need locked down HW marked as "updated" by some megacorp. Problem mostly solved.
Millions of people use outdated software/hw just fine otherwise.
So these school districts bought a $250 computer 7 years ago, and are complaining that Google won't continue to support it with free software updates?
I'm sorry but phrasing it as "jeopardizing students’ educations" is dishonest and manipulative. Not even Apple has support periods that long, and they sell $1000+ devices.
Plus you can easily install a Linux distro on Chromebooks and extend the life yourself.
Had they bought $250 Windows laptops seven years ago, they still would've received updates for another 2.5 years.
These laptops aren't used for video editing or 3D modeling. They need to run text editors and a few Chrome tabs. The screens are still the same old terrible resolutions. There's no reason why these devices shouldn't be usable to be honest.
10 years of software support for laptops is the norm, in my experience. I've seen people be more than content with older devices. If you're right and Apple can't get that level of support on macOS, then Apple is the disappointment, not the school's expectations.
> these school districts bought a $250 computer 7 years ago
I have not tried to confirm this myself, but the petition ends by stating that some of these products are still available for purchase today.
> you can easily install a Linux distro on Chromebooks and extend the life yourself
It is entirely possible that YOU can do that. But I have worked in school technical support departments (once long ago, I led one) and I can assure you that in most cases THEY are not capable of installing a Linux distro on their Chromebooks.
>It is entirely possible that YOU can do that. But I have worked in school technical support departments (once long ago, I led one) and I can assure you that in most cases THEY are not capable of installing a Linux distro on their Chromebooks.
Lets say they need to buy a new computer for $400, for 1,000 students. Can you spend less than $400,000 to figure this out?
Lets expand it to a school district, can you spend less than $4,000,000 to figure this out?
Whose responsibility is it to ensure that students have access to free computers? Yours? Mine? The government's? Google's?
Add up the salaries of all the administrators who signed that letter and you'd be able to buy new laptops a hundred times over. Yet it's Google engineers who must volunteer their time, or they'll get publicly shamed over it.
Apple uses to go at a great lengths in order to jeopardizing students so it is not a role model.
And since a Chromebook OS is Gentoo (AFAIK) Google might just de-google that laptops and return the ability for user to continue to do at least some limited set of tasks. 7 years is nothing for any laptop with replaceable battery.
> We want to teach students how to have a sustainable relationship with technology, where they gain digital literacy while also understanding how to take care of technology and avoid being wasteful. Chromebooks need to last longer and become easier to repair.
We want to teach students so much that we bought the cheapest junk available and now are shocked, shocked I tell you, that it's being depreciated (the devices that didn't fall apart or die early).
The hypocrisy of talking down to Google when they bought the wrong thing in the first place is rich. Google doesn't come out of this smelling like roses but come on.
Potentially that, or MacBooks, or Chromebooks that had a longer support window (though that won’t fix the fact Chromebooks are cheap and would still fall apart on them).
I get the impression that negotiating a longer support window with Google might at least go a tad bit better than the Apple equivalent. Chromebooks are supposed to be cheap and replaceable, but replacing at fleet level would hurt a lot more.
Just to check: Can Google unilaterally do this? Obviously they could keep the actual browser updating, and they could keep much of the OS updated, but do they own the whole stack, including firmware, enough that they can maintain the whole thing? (I think the situation is actually pretty good on x86 at least, but worth checking.)
I don't know about arm machines, but Google has control of pretty much the whole stack and end of support isn't based on technical details: models are dropped from support based on time from initial release, not based on the cpu that's in them, and there's not much hardware outside the cpu to have become unsupportable.
And cpu-wise, the only important thing that some cpus might not support is virtualization extensions to run Android apps; but I think that already has the right hooks to hide itself if the processor doesn't support it (or maybe it's just a list of models that are allowed to use it).
The EU should really go after this planned obsolescence bullshit. If you want to sell hardware, or license software for hardware, in the EU then you shouldn’t be allowed to stop supporting it after 7 years.
It might’ve made sense in the world that was, where hardware would actually become obsolete. However when I look at my MacBook Air m1 with the smallest possible configuration and how it’s capable of doing anything I need for work as a software engineer (rust, c++, typescript, c#, python) “fast enough” I can’t see why I would need a new machine until it physically breaks down beyond repair.
Then again, maybe the EU should just invest money in Ubuntu or similar as well as some office365/google education alternative and then run Linux on the “chromebooks” our schools buy.
There is a big difference between planned obsolescence and support periods.
As long as a device can be repaired by the owner as much as practical and allows aftermarket operating systems or software to be installed on it, I don't see why a company should have unlimited liability for something they sold.
If they made it so you are dependent on them though, then yeah, they should remain responsible.
Whether or not it is planned obsolescence is not a technical question but one of intention.
If shorter support periods were motivated by an expectation that customers would feel forced to buy new hardware rather than launching into a complex Linux migration, then that would be planned obsolescence.
But I think it's not that simple. Limited support periods can always be justified by pointing to difficulties further upstream along the supply chain and to the fact that longer support periods cause degraded security and higher cost.
You could still argue that putting more regulatory pressure on hardware makers and platforms would indirectly lead to longer support periods throughout the industry.
On the other hand, you'd have to ask why consumers are not creating this pressure themselves. Has the market converged to a steady state where consumers no longer have a choice? If that was the case I would be all for regulation to create choice.
We should be under no illusion though that longer support periods come at a cost. If longer support is mandated by regulators then everyone will have to pay more. If we leave it to consumers then only those who value longer support will pay for it.
Buying the cheapest hardware possible and then petitioning vendors to fund longer support periods does not seem like a solution to me.
We have to make up our minds on whether using hardware for longer is for the common good and we all carry the costs, or if it is a feature of some products but not others and those who value it have to pay up.
> Whether or not it is planned obsolescence is not a technical question but one of intention.
intention is basically impossible to prove. The impact/effect of planned obsolescence isn't.
> On the other hand, you'd have to ask why consumers are not creating this pressure themselves. Has the market converged to a steady state where consumers no longer have a choice?
It often seems that way. Sometimes it will be more profitable to refuse to provide consumers with what they want.
> As long as a device can be repaired by the owner as much as practical and allows aftermarket operating systems or software to be installed on it, I don't see why a company should have unlimited liability for something they sold.
Unfortunately, most people cannot support devices themselves, even though many of us here can. I do believe a company should have unlimited liability for something they made: why not? At least for 15 years. Most electronics break then so the company should have the responsibility of recycling it should the consumer send back a broken one.
This would reduce the environmental impact of electronic devices and make developing new technology less profitable, which is a good thing.
You have a good point. It took some consideration for me to use the term “planned obsolescence” because it really is a different and more nefarious thing. Like the ink printers who would squirt excess print into a sponge and then stop working when they had done it x amount of times, which could be fixed by resetting the count.
I couldn’t come up with a better term for it though. Maybe planned abandonment? In either case the result is sort of similar on an enterprise level. Like here in Denmark we buy Chromebooks for school and use a lot of Google education, and while you can certainly have some privacy debates about that (and we have), the prospect of non-updated software is a different issue. EOL devices are replaced in those enterprise settings because of the security risk and the support burden they pose. In theory you could do things about it, but they are operated by IT departments of maybe 3 techies who also support all the other devices for the 5000+ employees in a municipality so it’s almost always cheaper to simply replace the devices.
In the past this often made sense because the hardware was so old it couldn’t really run “new things”. It might even make sense for Chromebooks that are 7 year olds here in 2023, but it probably won’t make sense the next time.
I don’t think the practice of Google will change voluntarily, so to me it sort of becomes “planned obsolescence” even though it’s not exactly the same thing as there is total transparency with the EOL on software updates. But you’re right, it’s not the same.
Like the ink printers who would squirt excess print into a sponge and then stop working when they had done it x amount of times, which could be fixed by resetting the count.
Inkjet printers are a fatally flawed technology for occasional printing (the vast majority of home printing needs). They really should be relegated to commercial printing only.
Ink dries up, makes a sticky mess, and clogs the very tiny nozzles of the print head. People who buy inkjet printers and then only print once a month or less are basically buying something they can only print with a handful of times ever before the machine needs service. These people would be way better served by laser printers which are far more serviceable, durable, and completely amenable to occasional printing (no liquids to dry up)!
I bought the cheapest HP printer a few years ago. As every HP printer I ever tested, it has problems with the paper feed (grabs multiple pages at once or, usually, can't grab any at all). However, in regards to the printing heads, no problems for years, and I had probably over 10 one-month pauses between printing.
Meaning, you're just wrong, inkjet printers aren't nearly as unreliable as you portray them.
Windows and even macOS have longer support periods, so the market is already taking care of the problem. Google is notorious for short support periods (aren't Pixel phones supported for only 3 years?), so why is the government buying Chromebooks for schools without mandating longer support terms?
Also, as the parent said, as long as you can "jailbreak" your device and install anything you want, support periods are simply a competitive advantage.
> so why is the government buying Chromebooks for schools without mandating longer support terms?
Having spent a decade in politically led organisations I wouldn't personally rely on them for long term planing. I still remember when our analysis team went before the elected officials and told them that if our citizenship increased from 50.000 to 60.000 then they would likely need bigger schools in 5-10 years because 90% of the people moving to our city were young families. Increasing our citizenship to 70.000 was part of the priorities from basically every political party, they even paid the top management bonuses if this was achieved. But the schools were never expanded. Then 5-10 years later when there weren't enough room in the schools and the parents started operating their own "free schools" (basically the same as public schools but more expensive for the city), the politicians spent 6 months trying to find someone within the administration to blame for not warning them that this would happen.
So the easy answer is that they bought them because they thought they were cheap.
This change is likely only due to anticipation of a proposed EU law that would require 3+2 years of support, the Pixel 5a released in 2021 will only get 3 years of support, including security updates, and every single Pixel and Nexus phone that has been discontinued has had <= 3 years of support.
For comparison, all but the first 2 iPhones have received 4-5 years of support with the iPhone 6S being the oldest iPhone still receiving support almost 8 years later.
Android has been a complete joke when it comes to software support for older hardware, it's almost sad that it took proposed legislative pressure to change this.
One basic idea that came from this thread is to Google to promote and help an event to receive the Chromebooks and install Linux, ChromeOS Flex, whatever, in the day.
I think the core problem is not just absolescence but communication. With great power comes great responsability and many times we see the same laws should apply for normal companies and cash cows. This is basically the consumer laws goal.
These Chromebooks are unlockable. Go ahead and keep using them with Linux forever, they are not e-waste. The real planned obsolescence issue is hardware that can't be unlocked, like iPads.
I think this is the legislative way forward. Mandate that all devices should be unlocked and allow installing alternate operating systems, with the requisite documentation to build such operating systems published.
This address two problems: device obsolescence and control over ones own device. I’m not particularly sympathetic to the idea of forcing Apple to drastically change iOS via legislation. However, it should be possible to install Android on iDevices for those who want a different privacy/control tradeoff than what Apple provides with iOS
> Mandate that all devices should be unlocked and allow installing alternate operating systems, with the requisite documentation to build such operating systems published.
I develop for embedded devices and I don't see this working as intended.
Embedded devices often have secure boot efuses burned during manufacturing. There's no way to reverse that later or install your own cert.
Datasheets and SDKs for the chips are behind expensive support contracts and onerous NDAs.
Industry and middleware vendors are absolutely opposed to giving away anything, even though many of them fork existing FOSS projects for their SDKs.
We already have mechanisms to obtain source code, and yet there's no effective enforcement mechanism for companies that ignore GPL requests.
I agree that more needs to be done to prevent planned obsolescence, but I do not believe lawmakers have the technical knowledge to write anything effective.
> Industry and middleware vendors are absolutely opposed to giving away anything
I mean, "industry and vendors" were also opposed to everything from the 40h week to pollution filters. That's why they are laws: because otherwise money trumps the common good.
It's absolutely doable and enforceable that any consumer device sold in a given market should be repurposeable after, say, a period of 5 to 10 years from the end of its manifacturing run. On expiration of such window, schematics, software, and keys, should be provided to some central state-run repository. If a company is sold, acquirers should inherit all obligations, hence improving the situation with "lost" IP as a side-effect.
It would be the hardware equivalent of patent expiration.
Not my area of expertise and I agree with your concerns about lawmakers, but with the input of experts, such as yourself, would it not be achievable?
What I described is, after all, how desktop computers work. I can buy off the shelf components, assemble them, and install a variety of Linux distros or Windows. I don't quite understand why the same thing wouldn't be possible on mobile devices.
You usually have some sort of boot chain signature for the efuses. You have an initial bootloader and then that checks the signature of the next in the boot chain and so on. You could write an unlocked signed bootloader on the board, that is valid and boots and that can boot into anything.
If I'm not mistaken, that's _exactly_ what G is doing with the Chromebooks.
I might have been unclear. I meant that google ship devicess e-fuses enabled but with the unlocked bootloader option (using, I believe, the mechanism I tried describing above). They do make this, a lot of other vendors don't. Good for them!
Here is the problem with that. If Google does continue to support the product “forever”, then 20 years from now when a major vulnerability is exposed, they will have to fix it or perform a recall or something.
I saw this first hand when the large medical device company I worked for put in extraordinary effort to support a legacy product, well past its original intended lifepsan. It was costing a lot to keep support reps trained, make supplies, keep engineers around, etc. etc.
Then the FDA decided that there was a “security vulnerability “ and we had to recall all of them. Well yes no shit the device with a 25 year old wireless protocol has some issues.
After that, the executives realized that legacy product on the roster was just a giant risk, and we now explicitly End Of Life things….
It’s strange that cars can operate without vendor support for 100+ years. What happens when a vulnerability arises through the 2010 infotainment console?
The KIA executives are having the exact same conversation right now after being required to recall vehicles from 2011[1].
I don't have a good answer for this, but requiring a company to "fix" something 12 years later that is tough. This is how planned obsolescence becomes a corporate strategy.
That's not what planned obsolescence is. The Chromebooks keep being functional, they just don't keep receiving new software updates.
> If you want to sell hardware, or license software for hardware, in the EU then you shouldn’t be allowed to stop supporting it after 7 years.
What might actually happen in response to such legislation:
1) Chromebooks will just become more expensive for every additional year of mandated support and become prohibitively expensive if the support has to be forever.
2) Chromebooks will continue to be "supported" with cosmetic/poorly tested updates.
3) Chromebooks will ship without the "Automatic Update" feature.
The only thing that seems to motivate people to care about the future is their children.
A feudal monarch worries about his heirs.
A modern CEO cares about this quarter.
But people have no children (maybe fine -- we're overpopulated anyway), and there is no future. It's just about affording the nicest house you can before your consciousness goes black forever.
These chromebooks remain operational. As someone who does not plan on actively using the same computer for a decade, I am unwilling to pay a premium on any future purchases so that my museum pieces remain fully supported. Mind you, I have never thrown away a computer and keep a large collection of obsolete hardware.
People who want to churn devices should be paying a premium for any and all recycling costs (assuming perfect recycling is even possible).
I am unwilling to pay with a permanently degraded environment so that some people satisfy their consumption urges.
Clearly we shouldnt want to keep archaic stuff functional. But for some time now easily upgradeable/repairable hardware and software is effectively suppressed.
Everyone should pay for the pollution costs of everything they buy. A tax that covers 100% of the cost of cleaning up the pollution the thing you bought has and will create.
Right after this companies will invest in reducing the pollution making things and disposing of things cause. And other companies will invest in making cleaning up pollution cheaper.
when you buy a new machine in europe, then the seller has to take back the old one for free. this at least applies to household appliances. i think it applies to computers too, but i am not sure.
i think that approach solves the problem. it pushes the cost and responsibility of recycling or disposal to the seller of the new device. they will factor that into their calculation so the consumer pays for it.
It helps, but without other controls (which may exist, of course) it means that the shittiest manufacturer wins.
If company A makes a product that is cheap to make, but expensive to recycle, and company B makes a product that is expensive to make but has recycling as a core value, and thus is cheap to recycle, company B loses when they have to take on company A's device after a sale.
The costs should be on the original manufacturer and as such, reflected in the purchase price.
well, in most cases you don't buy directly from the manufacturer but from a shop who can send the device to the original manufacturer if appropriate. but i have also doubt that anything can be so expensive to recycle that it would cause a problem. how big could possibly be the difference between an expensive to recycle washing machine and a cheap one? not to mention laws that favor the use of materials that are easy to recycle. and a brief search suggests that some in europe are considering taxes for the use of difficult to recycle materials, like plastic.
Your M1 will expire roughly in 10 years when Apple stops supporting macOS upgrades and maybe 2 more years until no recent software would run on it. It's not that much different to expiring Chromebooks.
It's actually worse because there's no open source version of macOS. There are at least four options available to continue running an up-to-date version of Chrome on an out-of-support Chromebook (1. Lacros, 2. Chrome OS Flex, 3. Chromium OS, 4. Any old Linux with Chrome installed). There are zero ways to continue getting Safari updates on an out-of-support Apple device.
You're right for iOS, but you can have distros running on intel macs, and given the attention and engineering success of asahi linux, you'll probably be able to run to date software on macs with linux kernel for a long time.
My 2010 x86 MBP still receives MacOS updates and runs every piece of software just fine.
With the browser being the most important software for the target audience of a chromebook, I think the life could be expanded a lot as long as you can update the browser. Sure, you won't receive OS security updates, but browsers do a pretty good job at sandboxing anyway. A 15 year old laptop with a modern browser should be plenty secure as long as you do everything in the browser.
Obviously, you don't want to do any professional work on a 10 year old laptop, but for the chromebook audience why not?
Does it? My rMBP from 2012 is no longer officially supported since Big Sur (due to a WiFi adapter incompatibility of all things). Not that I have any use for it but it's just a decorative element at this point.
This is not planned obsolescence tho, this is just "well, we don't sell it anymore so we don't support it". Someone have to pay for the ongoing support. I think the most that should be required from manufacturer is opening up the boot (so alternatives can be EASILY installed), and ship drivers with permissive license.
It’s a question of incentive. Right now, supporting software is costly for a long time because very little attention is given to making software maintenance cheap.
That’s why it’s reasonable to force company to offer long term support after sells. It means they will have to design software so that it remains viable with a minimum of changes for a long time. Things that don’t make sense today because of their costs like formally proving code and design suddenly become important and as there is an incentive to make it cheaper to be competitive we should see new investments in this field which is currently quite neglected.
Overall it’s a net gain for all of us. In exchange for marginally more expensive computers for a bit (or less profits if that’s how companies want to compete), we will end up with safer more robust software and longer lived appliances.
It would be a major step in the right direction. As someone trained as an engineer, I still think that the software industry tolerance for subpar under-engineered and tested solutions is shameful.
The track record in other industry is that it might make things more expensive at first then back to affordable once the engineering solutions have matured. There is a clear incentive for companies in making things cheaper after all. It means both more profits and access to new market segments. That’s the magic of legislation: it can be very effective as a tool to give a direction to research and development.
That's not a good rebuttal. The context is $250 laptops that afford students technology literacy for cheap. Not, I can't afford a yacht and I'm ok with it, ergo everyone else can be ok with things they can't afford.
My netbook from 2009 that is still working, was sold with a Linux distribution, and gotten multiple Ubuntu updates, and is still working perfectly fine.
Its price? 300 euros.
So apparently not something that is only for people that can only afford yachtes.
Well, there is some blame to be put on education system for not going open, but chromebooks are significantly less IT maintenance than average linux laptop.
In ideal world it would be non-profit partnering with hardware vendors to produce <educational linux distro> and certify various devices for it. Then non-profit could continue to develop the systems and vendors would have incentive (schools will buy your hardware) to help.
To me, thats the minimal necessary solution in case of a vendor going bankrupt but there should be a mandatory minimum Support window after the last sale of a device by the manufacturer and that should be non-trivial for security issues (say 10 years).
"And that, my boy, is how we killed the market for hardware startups. We raised the barriers to entry to the point that no one was willing to compete with the giants."
"And that, my boy, is how we figured out that you can make laws that scale with company size, thus keeping hardware startups from that requirement but making sure big megacorps couldn't abuse their market position"
how is the M1 at all relevant? it's not even 3 years old and the cheapest configuration upon release was over $1k. you're comparing it to these Chromebooks that were $400 7 years ago! of course the Chromebooks, even at point of release, weren't very future proof.
The EU should really go after this planned obsolescence bullshit
They are doing so. One of their biggest plans is to force manufacturers to include user-replaceable batteries. This should extend the life of laptops by several years at least.
Screw the batteries, its the tiny amount of RAM that is going to kill the laptops. We need to make it so that soldered on RAM can only be sold if the laptop ships with at least a certain amount of RAM. Should properly be 16 now, then 32 in 3 years.
You could ban it entirely, but there are some advantages to soldered on RAM, such as higher possible max speeds.
16gb? The average consumer shouldn’t need anywhere near that much ram for general web browsing, email and document editing. Ram isn’t like money. It doesn’t get worse over time. My computer in college in 2004 did all the things the average user needs - I could watch videos online and browse the web just fine. Why should consumers today need to pay for faster hardware to do the same set of tasks?
They don't need that today, but only the cheapest laptops are sold with less than 8gb today, so if they are to last for 10 years you need 16gb today, because that is also what you are going to be stuck with in ten years.
Your annecdotes about what was required of a laptop twenty years ago are very relevant if you are connected to the same web you were twenty years ago. Most consumers aren't.
What websites need that much RAM? Even reddit's redesign is only using up 200mb in firefox for me at the moment. Spotify's desktop app is using 500mb - which I'll grant is pretty wasteful given its not even playing music. Honestly, 8gb of ram is fine for an awful lot of people. Why should regular users need more ram?
Even assuming software (like Teams) does chew up users' RAM, the idea that we should push that problem onto the consumer is backwards. Instead of asking consumers to pay more for their devices, developers should just stop being so lazy with our software.
My mum shouldn't need to buy a new laptop every few years if her computing needs don't change. Its sloppy and wasteful.
This is not planned obsolescence tho, this is just "well, we don't sell it anymore so we don't support it". Someone have to pay for the ongoing support. I think the most that should be required from manufacturer is opening up the boot (so alternatives can be EASILY installed), and ship drivers with permissive license after they stop updating it
>Then again, maybe the EU should just invest money in Ubuntu or similar as well as some office365/google education alternative and then run Linux on the “chromebooks” our schools buy.
As long as this is paid with the salaries of the EU busybodies instead of my own money I'm okay with it.
Other than that, let us have free commerce, thank you very much.
Congrats. You just killed all small consumer hardware companies with 7 years software support. I mean all the EC crap costs alone €30k, then electronic waste taxes and software support on top. Let the Europeans play with wooden horses then.
Maybe they shouldn't release garbage onto the market? I have collected roughly a dozen systems over the years, they all run Debian 12 and with one exception everything works fine. That one exception being a special purpose Vista Ready "GPU" that forced even Vista to run in a compatibility profile for older hardware.
I mean, this is honestly kind of the goal. If you aren’t able to demonstrate that your hardware product isn’t going to burst into flames or damage the environment… maybe it’s better that it’s not for sale?
The EU really needs to learn the idea of small business exemptions from the regulatory burden. It should be possible to sell a few hundred to a few thousand devices without having to deal with regulations aimed at hundreds of millions of devices.
There's a chunk of small electronics businesses that don't exist because of the regulatory burden. The cost of compliance is fixed regardless of how large your production run is. CE costs almost prevented Raspberry Pi from existing!
(this is why Europe could never compete with aliexpress, either)
No one can compete with Alien Express due to how IP laws work in China, and the production costs, thanks to everyone outsourcing their manufacturing there.
When I work at Google, a fancy VP of hardware needed IT help. While I was helping him, I complained about my $900 Pixel 2, and joked that it'll be a paper wait in 3 years because of engineered obsolescence.
He told me to stop talking like that, said it wasn't funny at all.
Dude knew I was onto something. Google acts like they are all carbon neutral, but they ship out devices that they kill in less than 3 years.
I had a perfectly fine Acer with an intel and Nvidia chip in it, Google artificially deprecates it and I can't get updates anymore. I couldn't even get the Android app update on it. A $500 laptop turned into a paperweight in less than 2 years.
We should have higher standards and we should hold hardware makers to them. They shouldn't be allowed to rip us off on a schedule, and basically put us on a subscription to buy new ones every 2 to 3 years.
This article seems to focus on how Chromebooks stop receiving updates.
I don’t know if that is reasonable for Google to do or not. I don’t know whether they could just keep updating it for three more years or something like that.
But in any case the hardware itself isn’t worn out, and like others have said you can install a Linux distribution.
We didn’t used to have these big “No more updates now forevermore” notifications. I guess because we didn’t need to (or didn’t think we needed to) keep updating the OS for security purposes. My second laptop started on Windows Vista and then moved on to Ubuntu. I could probably install the latest Ubuntu if I was still using it. Although it wouldn’t be great with the default setup due to the limited amount of RAM.
Unless Google has set their EOL to something unreasonable then this isn’t “planned obsolecence”. Planned obsolescence is to build in things that will fail so that you have to buy something new after a while. Supporting old hardware with new updates might cost something to Google, just like how supporting old hardware or software with things like security updates tend to cost not-nothing in general.
Like I indirectly mentioned, having to install a new OS used to be thing that you had to do. I have to update my OS and I am not looking forward to it since a simple command-line upgrade might fail in some way, thus I will probably have to do it manually. But now apparently people are throwing their hands up because of a warning that says that the software won’t be updated. Now I’m not saying that teachers should do it kind of like an extra-curricular activity.[1] And perhaps there should be professionals available who know how to either upgrade the Chromebooks (why can’t they be manually upgraded?) or to install a sane OS like a Linux distribution.
Lastly, petitioning a corporation might not get you anywhere. I say this out of pure cynicism. It’s better to petition your government to force companies to do “the right thing”.
[1] I have to mention this because apparently American teachers have to buy their own school supplies and other such nonsense since they are so underfunded.
Schools bought these Chromebooks because they are low-cost and also low-maintenance: Google takes care of updates, and you have far fewer stuff to configure (that can also be configured incorrectly) than with Windows (which BTW now also has an "expiry date": Windows 11 has very strict hardware requirements, and Windows 10 will be EOL in 2024). So proposing to install Linux instead, with all the configuration hassle that implies, is not really realistic I'm afraid...
Problem is, I could only install Debian to old Chromebook, because it only had 10 GB internal disk space. It is enough disk space to install Debian, XFCE, Chrome and LibreOffice, using Debian network install. It is not enough to install full distro like Ubuntu or Linux Mint, installers check that there is not enough disk space to install them.
Cant you install another OS on those machines? Like LineageOS, or something like that. My Android tablet is really old, but with LineageOS it still has a fairly recent Android version.
I have 3 of those HP 13 G1s between my son an myself, and they are pretty nice little laptops. High res display, great battery life, i7 CPU and 16GB RAM in the higher spec version. My son re-installed his with Linux and the storage is too slow for that, but mine was my primary home laptop for ~7 years.
So with StackOverflow decline proving there is little left to search for, DRMs in browsers forcing ads and hardware expiration can we finally come to a consensus that Google and all other oligopol firms should be removed from power?
As governements and large companies run out of energy to exploit it's up to us to stop them before we don't have the juice left to maintain fundamental order.
Only 2 ways about it: stop consuming and producing their agenda?
Chromebooks themselves are most likely jeopardizing student's educations, so maybe this will lead to some school districts to rethink their "give every student a laptop" approach which has had no evidence that it has any benefits to the child's learning.
Or how about fix your terrible parental system to actually work? It forces me to log my kid into the Chromebook every time with my own account first. Yes I’ve tried to fix it. No google doesn’t have any support and there are plenty of threads about it in their support groups.
But, it was completely predictable thing, the schools knew perfectly well that they would expire. Saying that the expiry "jeopardizes students’ educations" is straight out dishonest when its just poor planning that is jeopardizing anything. This feels bit like people buying disposable cameras and then complaining that they can't change film on them. Yes, the expiry on Chromebooks is bit more arbitrary. But nevertheless it was something that would have been very clear if they did basic due diligence when purchasing the devices.