Google's 10-year Chromebook lifeline leaves old laptops headed for silicon cemetery Google promised a decade of updates for its Chromebooks in 2023 to stop them being binned so soon after purchase, but many are still set to reach the end of the road sooner than later. The appliance-like laptop devices were introduced by megacorp in 2011, running its Linux-based ChromeOS platform. They have been produced by a …
As I boasted in another thread, my Xmas project was to convert a 2013 Toshiba Chromebook to run Linux. Took about two slightly hair raising hours, but is now running Mint as a competent (if slow) fully functioning laptop.
To be fair, your non-IT relatives aren't going to be doing this anytime soon, but if you're a Reg reader, then you have few excuses - assuming somebody has hacked out a new bios for you ageing Chromebook.
>Either a regular Linux for the later Chrome OS that really is linux
You're thinking of GNU.
ChromeOS is Gentoo GNU/Linux with the freedom removed (access to GNU restricted) and I guess later versions permit more access to GNU, while using the exact same proprietary version of the kernel, Linux.
Mine was just over four years old and died completely and utterly, to the extent of no power input. I've stripped it down for disposal. They are cheap for a reason. They are good for basic things, mine handled Android and Linux apps to an extent, but be warned, the hardware is pretty terrible.
We throw away 200 million LCD screens from laptops every year, you can actually run a school library with rpi nano and HDMI2LCD cable, and an ssd with 128gb of books, like all of wiki kids, and it so happens we have 300 million kids without books... I want to put the old laptop LCDs in ferrocement in a vapor barrier with a tempered glass so they would last 5 years in village sand povide knowledge of trees and the world to parents and kids and reading lessons and some audio too.
Manufacturers use a variety of tricks to reduce both the likelihood and usefulness of their devices being converted to "regular" PC use.
* Keyboards missing function keys - having only equivalents for F1-F10; no F11, F12, SysReq, etc.
* Non-replacable batteries
* Non-x86 CPUs (this is much-less of an issue than it used to be, as 3rd-party bootloaders and OSes are now commonly available for ARM)
* Locked motherboards (no jumper pins or switch to allow BIOS reflash)
(Running OpenBSD on my full-keyboard Acer C720 here.)
They stop getting updates, but they work almost like they always did. I used my out of support Chromebook for two or three years, what eventually forced my hand to put Linux on it was that the out of date browser was blocked by a small but increasing numbers of websites (eg Screwfix), or returned misformatted pages that made sites unuseable (eg What HiFi and most sister publications in Future Publishing's stable).
A little popup window reminds you your Chromebook is out of support from time to time, but it's easily overlooked by people who don't understand the possible significance.
as the article says, phones are the same. I have updated a few to run lineage etc, but then banking apps often stop working, even if you say to said bank "this phone is still getting updates to security etc, whereas the origina OS is not and is now a security risk", they don't care.
I am also surprised that group has not made more noise about W11 and its bad requirements and waste of perfectly good kit
*nix is an option for a lot, but for some users it is not and other apps may not work as you would want (sky sports, Onedrive)
Does the bank have a choice? I was under the impression that rooting a device would set some sort of write-once flag in the encryption module to state that the device could no longer be "trusted", and that's what is causing the problem. That you're running a better, supported, OS doesn't matter as the encryption thing just says "nope".
Yes the flag isn't "is this device getting updates" but "has this device been tampered with"
On Google Pixel phones you can install a properly signed alternate android build and include the proper keys, on other phones you need to leave it unlocked and have the banking apps try and determine if it is stock.
If the hardware starts lasting longer because Google are keeping the updates running longer, that's going to screw the manufacturers. The pricing / performance was based on rapid obsolesence, i.e. your ChromeBook customer was going to be a repeat customer within 3 years.
Now, once everything has averaged out, there's every possibility that they won't be back to buy again for 10 years. On average that's a drop of 66% in anticipated revenue for manufacturers' Chromebook product lines.
There's also a front-loading to this; sales for the next 7 years are likely to decline even more sharply as today's buyers will not be buying again for a long time to come.
And one then has to question, can they still be profitably sold at current prices at 33% (or less) of the established production volume going forward? Probably not. The margins can never have been great (given the low retail price), and low margins work only if the volume is high.
So far as I can see, the only way manufactureres can continue to make money on Chromebooks is if the prices go up. The problem with that is then purchasers might ask if one is buying a Chromebook at full laptop prices, is there any value in having a Chromebook at all?
Many may decide to buy a laptop. If they did, that'd be the end of Chromebook as a viable platform.
Many, if not most, Chromebooks are already at comparable prices to normal laptops. People are still buying them enough for new models to get made. I don't know why, but they are. That means they'll probably be good to continue selling those things for some time. The lowest-end hardware, which is a little cheaper than comparable Windows machines but not as much as you might think, is probably not going to last the full decade for reasons other than software updates. Early obsolescence is still in their toolbox.
Correct, when you simply look at the hardware spec. However the key difference, especially at the low / medium end, is how the system performs for the user. The difference between a cheap, low-spec machine booting and running Windows 10/11 and similar spec, probably even cheaper Chromebook is like night and day. Cheap Chromebooks are perfectly usable for the things most non-gamers/developers actually do on their laptops but a comparable machine running Windows is just extended, slow-death misery - and that's before you suffer the constant nagging and pleading to buy a full Microsoft 365 subscription.
I'll have to take your word for how well a low-end Chromebook is, though I have heard complaints which suggest that your observation may not be universal. Since I have used no Chromebooks, I can't counter it with experiences of my own. I have experienced some low-end Windows computers, and it's not quite as dire as you paint it. I have a feeling that many people who have such things do not like them because it is not difficult to use them in a way that makes them miserable to work with. However, I have had the misfortune to use Windows 10 on 2 GB of RAM and an EMMC and, to a lesser extent, Windows 11 on 4 GB of RAM and also an EMMC. I could browse around with that. I could read email and edit documents with it. I could write code on it, which probably wasn't in your list but that is one of the things I did most on that machine. It was far from ideal, but it wasn't useless. I'm therefore not entirely convinced that Chromebooks are a significantly better user experience at the low end, and if they are, I would guess without further description that the difference is that it's harder to make Chrome OS do inefficient things.
Chromebooks are going nowhere.
First of all, consumers are just a small part of Chromebook buyers, the larger ones are educational institutions and large corporations. Chromebooks make sense because they are vastly easier to manage and much more secure than Windows, and especially for corporate users come with much higher user satisfaction than Windows clients.
And not all Chromebooks are shitty low quality $300 laptops like the ones at Walmart, they actually cover the whole range from bottom of the barrel to top of the range high spec laptops with tons of RAM and lots of cores.
For hardware vendors, Chromebooks are not vastly different than their Windows laptop offerings, while the software side effort that's needed to maintain them is much lower (since the OS is essentially free and maintained by Google). They make money not just from hardware sales but also from maintenance contracts, same as they do from Windows devices. For Google, ChromeOS is part of their business offerings and brings in solid revenues from subscriptions (Google Workspace, ChromeOS Enterprise). Google's tendency to kill stuff is also much more focused on consumer products, less so on business products.
Chromebooks are banned at the office and at home and are extremely discouraged at the Fine Tertiary Level Institution where I occasionally teach. Well, that, and how badly they do MS Office (Web version only. Web version stinks.). The Fine Tertiary Level Institution has gone so far as to have a special insert just for certain courses requiring the use of MS Office (supplied for 'free' to all students and staff) or 'highly compatible' application suites; Apple iWork (free) and LibreOffice (free) are on the approved list, as long as students turn in DOCX, XLSX, or PPTX files; interestingly, WordPerfect Office (not free) is not on the approved list. (DOC, RTF, TXT, XLS, and PPT are unacceptable; the various ODx formats are accepted by some instructors (me and a few others)...) We are slowly removing MS Office and replacing it with iWork and LibreOffice at the office. At home, I'm pretty much all in on LibreOffice, with occasional iWork for things that LibreOffice is clumsy at (tables; about the only thing that Numbers is good for is building elegant tables...).
Can LibreOffice even run on a Chromebook?
It should be noted that as far as the Fine Tertiary Level Institution is concerned, Chromebooks are a waste of time and money. iPads and iPad Pros are seen as lasting longer and being cheaper in the long run. When Apple products are considered to be cheaper, you're Doing It Wrong.
Can LibreOffice even run on a Chromebook?
Yes. My Tosh Chromebook 2 installed LibreOffice as part of the Mint install, and works just fine. Downloaded a 250k XLSX spreadsheet onto it, opened that quickly enough and displayed properly without any challenge. As my Chromebook has only 4 GB RAM and 16 GB of eMMC storage it couldn't cope with anything too meaty in the multi-tasking stakes, but for a ten year old lightweight laptop it's surprisingly sprightly and capable - which goes to show how crippled Chromebooks are under Chrome OS.
My dirt cheap Asus Cromebook, bought on impulse a couple of years back as a device to take on travels without caring if it gets lost or stolen, runs LibreOffice in its Linux VM just fine, together with any other Linux apps I've tried. It also runs some old Windows apps under Wine which my Win10 system point-blank refuses to launch, even with compatibility mode settings. It's not the fastest thing on the planet but has a great full-HD screen, decent keyboard, runs cool and silent and "just works" - and nothing beats my glow of smugness seeing others using their ten-times-as-costly theft-magnet Apple MacBooks for exactly the same email/web-browsing/document-editing functions with no appreciable advantage...
Isn't the amazing thing that we are complaining that 10year old hardware is being abandoned for purely software support costs?
Imagine using a 1985 era Mac or PC-XT in 1995 or a 1995 NiCad-powered 800x600 resolution 486sx portable in 2005 !
Alternately isn't it depressing that PCs haven't noticeably improved in 10 years ?
I have a PC I put together in 2013. It has an i5 processor and 32GB RAM. I recently swapped out the graphics card because I was given an Nvidia P2000 which was better than what I had. It's running Linux perfectly happily. I have looked at replacing it a few times but I'm not convinced newer stuff at an affordable price is going to be significantly better. It's not capable of running Windows 11, but that's OK, I don't want to.
"I'm not convinced newer stuff at an affordable price is going to be significantly better"
It's not. Don't know if you bought it with 32GB or upgraded, but that's a healthy amount of RAM. Storage... you can get very large HDDs at a good price and get a nice price per GB. Put SSDs have cartel pricing so your newer SSD might be faster but it's not going to be bigger.
CPU-wise... I've ended up with a few systems in that 15-20 year old range as well as a scattering of newer gear. Going from a Core system (like Core 2 Duo or the power-hungry Q6600 Core 2 Quad), Moore's law was still in effect, like a early gen core i3/5/7 that was just a few years newer was a lot faster than the Core 2, Moore's law was on the ropes but it was still probably double every 2 or 3 years back then. Since then... well, an Sandy Bridge (3rd gen), Ivy Bridge (4th Gen), Coffee Lake (8th gen), Tiger Lake (11th gen), between 3rd and 8th gen it's probably a ~50% speedup per core, and 3rd to 11th *maybe* double per core. I mean, my Coffee Lake has 6 cores instead of 4 as well, the 11th gen is a notebook so it's 2C/4T, nice per-core performance but not too powerful multicore. And you've read about the 12th/13th/14th gen... "it's slightly faster... no wait it's a bit slower... oh it's even.. oh actually it's slower... the microcode will make it a little faster.. wait it didn't, or maybe it did..." LOL.
Double is nothing to sneeze at, but for something like 10 years newer it's not a huge difference.. under the "doubling every 18 months" that happened in decades past, you would have had a 64x speedup in 9 years.
Side note, if you ever run into software that DOES need newer instructions (if your CPU is just old enough it may not support AVX2 for instance), check out "Intel SDE" (Software Development Emulator). You run an application under it, and it traps and emulates all missing instructions. I found there to be no discernible slowdown between running a build of some software that doesn't require newer instructions, and a build that uses them so Intel SDE must trap and emulate the missing instructions (i.e., obviously you can't magically get a speedup from instructions your CPU doesn't have, but it seems to break down and emulate them efficiently.. like maybe using 2 older AVX instructions to do an AVX2 instruction... so there's no discernible slowdown from the trap-and-emulate overhead either.)
I know replying twice is odd, but I figured this is almost a seperate topic... driver support for older hardware. As a Linux user since 1993, I began to wonder if Linux was EVER going to drop support for older hardware, I kept seeing ongoing support for stuff I was using when I first started using Linux... well they did drop support for 386 and 486 CPUs but other than that.
So finally, the answer to "will they ever drop driver support" is finally yes -- they're just now dropping support for accelerated graphics on Matrox cards and some other stuff I used in the mid to late 1990s. So, will your hardware be supported forever? Maybe not, but de facto they seem to be finally converging on a roughly 25 year support timeframe before they finally at least ask "Is anyone still using this hardware with a new kernel/distro?" and drop support if the answer is "no". So your hardware definitely has some life left in it LOL.
> Imagine using a .....1995 NiCad-powered 800x600 resolution 486sx portable in 2005 !
I'm running a 2009 netbook in this year of 2025, 16 years. Got a whopping 2GIGs of DRAM, and WinXP doesn't use a quarter of that. Junod's WinSolit from 1992 (made for Win3.x) runs slick as snake snot.
No fan! The 2005 predecessor died last year of a bad fan and unfriendly repair aspects. So the fanless Atom CPU and no rotating storage seem promising.
Happily running a 2008 era HP 2230s as a tinkering machine (and for travel if I'm headed anywhere a laptop could get easily nicked). 12.5" screen, 1TB SSD, 8GB RAM and the most powerful T series Core2Duo I could scrounge for a few quid on eBay - it's completely usable as a daily driver running MX Linux, apart from the ancient battery only having about 50% capacity left on a good day. I get around that with a chunky USB powerbank and a barrel jack adapter.
It'll handle youtube at 720p and can do everything I'd need a computer for outside of gaming.
I don't know about 1985, but I did use computers that long, or rather I used computers at the tail end of that period. Someone else usually had them when they were new. I used a 1995-era computer around 2005 and a 2000-era one around 2010. A single core and 256 MB of RAM wasn't ideal in 2010, but it was available and it worked. The per-year improvement was a lot larger then, but it wasn't that outlandish for someone to expect to use a computer for ten years even then.
Newest & least used computer on my desk is strangely a M4 Mac Mini. However, the primary Windows machines are all Lenovo W-series laptops that are still rockin' after 10+ years. A 14+ year old MacBook Pro & two 15+ year old Lenovo X-series laptops are the go-to mobile endpoints.
Upgrading really is a pain in the arse. So much crapware is embedded with new hardware it takes months to get a new system useable. In retrospect, maybe that is why I have purchased new Apple kit over the years, but keep digging my feet in for the Windows system upgrades. That is not to say I am inexperienced on new stuff, simply that I am more productive without it.
Desktop 16g i5 2011 ubuntu 24.10 ssd data runs app like libreoffice , except graphics, better and loads faster than an 2023 64B , pic4 ssd, Acer aspire 3 notebook. With win11 or ubuntu 24.10. go figure ..hardly much difference even building kernels. That's 12 years progress.
I, as the user, should be the sole entity that determines when a product is obsolete, not the manufacturer.
I should determine when the product doesn't do what it is designed to do. Period.
If it isn't cost-effective, or environmentally sound to keep using it, is up to me. Me alone.
If a car takes me from A to B, why would I buy another, if am I not convinced the new one will do it cheaper or better?
I don't know, Chromebooks are pretty much like Apple products as a whole: you are relying on the manufacturer of hardware (firmware, mostly) to also provide the software. This monopolistic approach is so prone to abuse. If they say the product is junk, they simply turn support off and all your gear becomes a paperweight without your consent, that is so monopolistic of them.
There is an Apple Store. There is a Google Store. There is no "Windows" store.
>I, as the user, should be the sole entity that determines when a product is obsolete, not the manufacturer.
You are in charge. No problem. The problem is simple....
Your favorite shiny browser drops support for an older OS. No problem, everything still works. Then they roll out support for a new security related feature/function. Call it a new encryption schema. But you are stuck, you cannot upgrade the browser.
It would work fine, they just stopped testing it on older operating systems and THEN added a hard block to prevent it from running even if you hacked around it.
Pretty soon your favorite websites start requiring support for the new security thingy. And bam, your hardware is now useless for those websites.
In 2019 I purchased an ASUS Quad Core 16" Touchscreen Laptop with a "decent" 1080p screen with 4gb ram and 64gb of storage. I don't get on my Chromebook much, just when I need or want too, maybe a handful of times per month. I check email, organize my photos and browse the Internet etc. That's about it. Good enough for me. Before I purchased it, I checked the expiration date... Good for 10 years! Well... Five years into it, and it's still going strong. Is it fast? No. Does it work for my needs? For sure. I just use Google products for free.
I purchased the unit for $280! That's it! If the unit continues to serve me for another five years that's costing me less than $30 a year for my computer. I'll take that and in five years I'll buy another Chromebook for the same price for another 10 years.
In five years if the price point is about the same, I'm going to do it all over again.
I won't have to think about updating my product, purchasing any more nilly willy software for my unit, that's pretty much what they say anyways say. The Chromebook is pretty much free from being hacked too as far as I've read. Nothing is completely free from that kind of business but my $300 five year old Chromebook continues to roar!
It's Gentoo GNU/Linux with the freedom removed.
Only 10 years of updates is still short considering that it really wouldn't take any extra work to offer updates to all devices.
Even though on some models, real GNU/Linux can be installed after jumping through many hoops, a lot of them use shoddy intel hardware, which means that hardware like the sound card doesn't work after the install (of course the soundcard is digitally handcuffed, eliminating any chance of anyone fixing it) and otherwise valueless "unsupported" used models aren't sold that cheaply, meaning that you'd be better off purchasing a cheap used real laptop and installing GNU/Linux without any hoops.
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