It's eight years from when the model is released so as long as you pay attention and don't buy a model that's already old at the time you buy it it's not too ba

It's eight years from when the model is released so as long as you pay attention and don't buy a model that's already old at the time you buy it it's not too bad. On many devices you can unlock the bootloader and install a third party chromeos distribution (or linux) after that if you really want, too 8 years is MUCH better than basically all android devices although it's probably worse than windows on a normal laptop, and you're guaranteed updates during that period The browser is in the process of being decoupled from the os version (it's in beta right now and you can opt in I think) so in the future even if you stop getting updates you'll be able to update the browser to fix the problem you're describing ("you can't even use it to watch streaming because the Chrome version number is too low"). If your chrome os devices are just past their lifetime and have enough storage, you may be able to opt into that and keep using them now actually I think in the case of schools, 8 years is probably longer than they would expect to keep using laptops anyway.