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Parents, environmentalists to Google: stop Chromebooks from expiring this summer

255 points by redundantly 3y ago

rtpg 3y ago
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.
- squarefoot 3y ago
  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. More info here. https://mrchromebox.tech/ https://mrchromebox.tech/
  - clipsy 3y ago
    Cool, now do all the software the school relies on just as easily
    - rtpg 3y ago
      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....
    - ke88y 3y ago
      IME for chromebooks there's not a lot of student software that doesn't have a web app version.
    - II2II 3y ago
      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.
  - rtpg 3y ago
    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!
    - toast0 3y ago
      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. [1] https://chromeenterprise.google/os/chromeosflex/ https://chromeenterprise.google/os/chromeosflex/
    - WWLink 3y ago
      > 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.
      - sdenton4 3y ago
  - kayodelycaon 3y ago
    Cool. Now how do we deploy that to 100+ Chromebooks without spending more on labor than buying new Chromebooks?
    - squarefoot 3y ago
      Unlocking and reflashing them could be one of the first assignments in tech classes.
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  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.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
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.)
- toast0 3y ago
  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).
  - jnwatson 3y ago
    No, there’s lots of low level software provided by third parties that Google doesn’t control.
- nitwit005 3y ago
  You wouldn't want the browser updates without OS and library updates. It'd do something like call a new system call and crash.
Animats 3y ago
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.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  It's a learning experience for kids. It teaches them that they can jailbreak hardware and install free software on it. The best educational things the school can do: Give the laptops to the kids free and clear, and tell them how to install Ubuntu.
  - heresie-dabord 3y ago
    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. [1] _ https://support.google.com/chromeosflex/answer/11552529?hl=en https://support.google.com/chromeosflex/answer/11552529?hl=e...
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    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.
- forgot-my-pw 3y ago
  I have Chromebooks that have been end of life for a few years. You can use it just as before, you just no longer get updates.
devjab 3y ago
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.
- lnsru 3y ago
  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.
  - Avamander 3y ago
    All you have to do is not force your stuff to become waste. It doesn't mean major updates, but updating e.g. openssl shouldn't be that hard. If you can't guarantee that then why should the EU guarantee a market (and recycling) for your product? It's not fair.
    - wiz21c 3y ago
      If (for example) Debian can do it, I'm sure Google can. They just have to leave their platforms open. It's not like it's expensive.
  - matthewmacleod 3y ago
    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?
pkaye 3y ago
Do these Chromebooks stop working or just no updates?
- II2II 3y ago
  Having dealt with this in the past: they just drop updates. That includes dropping support for the browser.
bullen 3y ago
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? When you abandon HTTP, you are lost forever. See it's all the same thing. YC if you understand go back to HTTP (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2289 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2289) for HN.
quickthrower2 3y ago
https://ubuntu.com/blog/tutorial-install-ubuntu-on-a-chromebook https://ubuntu.com/blog/tutorial-install-ubuntu-on-a-chromeb...
- xet7 3y ago
  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. https://github.com/xet7/chromebook https://github.com/xet7/chromebook
raincole 3y ago
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.
- mobilio 3y ago
  Chromebook continue to work as-is. Just remain forever on version X. You can still use it. You can install Linux after that.
  - modeless 3y ago
    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.
bnebxv 3y ago
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 ...
- SargeDebian 3y ago
  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.
  - putzxcv 3y ago
    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.
    - ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
      Don't know if it's paid vacation, but part of the monthly salary is reserved to pay out next years vacation
    - pjc50 3y ago
      > the installation should happen in class Class time is far too valuable for this kind of nonsense.
    - Claude_Shannon 3y ago
      At least in Poland even during vacation they are required to be at school for administrative reasons. Doing nothing, but still forced to be there.
zokier 3y ago
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.
- captn3m0 3y ago
  Folks raised similar cries around Pixel 3 and 4 EOL. Google doesn’t budge.
  - unaindz 3y ago
    The consumers being schools should have more power behind than the consumers of Pixels. Maybe it doesn't matter anyways but it's worth a try.
  - spiffytech 3y ago
    Pixel 6 and later moved the EOL from 3 years to 5. That's still imperfect, and remains less than iPhone, but it's a step.
    - isaacremuant 3y ago
      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.
    - alok-g 3y ago
self_awareness 3y ago
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.
- modeless 3y ago
  Yes. You can install Linux, or even Chrome OS Flex or Chromium OS.
duckmysick 3y ago
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?
- benplumley 3y ago
  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.
  - chongli 3y ago
    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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_device_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_device_management
  - wildrhythms 3y ago
    None of these K-12 schools or teachers are going to pay for 30+ USB drives for students.
  - presbyterian 3y ago
    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.
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    > You get usable laptops [citation needed]; how many bricks can you expect from having middle-schoolers monkey around with low-level firmware stuff?
avgcorrection 3y ago
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.
- rob74 3y ago
  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...
megous 3y ago
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.
- solardev 3y ago
  Yeah. This seems like a 15-min fix vs trying to get 10,000 signatures to petition Google's deaf ears. The laptops still work fine, despite being 7 years old. It's their own stupid test environment that's an issue.
footlose_3815 3y ago
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.
liquidpele 3y ago
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.
linsomniac 3y ago
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.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
paxys 3y ago
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.
- mcherm 3y ago
  > 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.
  - hospitalJail 3y ago
    >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? Feel free to expand this to a national level.
  - paxys 3y ago
    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.
- aldarisbm 3y ago
  Is this truly your take on it?
znpy 3y ago
But Sundar really needs that sweet sweet cash influx from parents getting new chromebooks for their children.
ecshafer 3y ago
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.
rejectfinite 3y ago
wow those dates.. I am using a 2014 desktop, an i7, running Windows 10 just fine. Still game on it too. Insane by Google
joshstrange 3y ago
> 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.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  What's the alternative, Microsoft Surface?
  - joshstrange 3y ago
    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).
    - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
      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.

255 points by redundantly 3y ago

rtpg 3y ago

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.

squarefoot 3y ago
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. More info here. https://mrchromebox.tech/ https://mrchromebox.tech/
- clipsy 3y ago
  Cool, now do all the software the school relies on just as easily
  - rtpg 3y ago
    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....
  - ke88y 3y ago
    IME for chromebooks there's not a lot of student software that doesn't have a web app version.
  - II2II 3y ago
    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.
- rtpg 3y ago
  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!
  - toast0 3y ago
    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. [1] https://chromeenterprise.google/os/chromeosflex/ https://chromeenterprise.google/os/chromeosflex/
  - WWLink 3y ago
    > 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.
    - sdenton4 3y ago
- kayodelycaon 3y ago
  Cool. Now how do we deploy that to 100+ Chromebooks without spending more on labor than buying new Chromebooks?
  - squarefoot 3y ago
    Unlocking and reflashing them could be one of the first assignments in tech classes.
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
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.

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago

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.)

toast0 3y ago
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).
- jnwatson 3y ago
  No, there’s lots of low level software provided by third parties that Google doesn’t control.
nitwit005 3y ago
You wouldn't want the browser updates without OS and library updates. It'd do something like call a new system call and crash.

Animats 3y ago

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.

quickthrower2 3y ago
It's a learning experience for kids. It teaches them that they can jailbreak hardware and install free software on it. The best educational things the school can do: Give the laptops to the kids free and clear, and tell them how to install Ubuntu.
- heresie-dabord 3y ago
  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. [1] _ https://support.google.com/chromeosflex/answer/11552529?hl=en https://support.google.com/chromeosflex/answer/11552529?hl=e...
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  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.
forgot-my-pw 3y ago
I have Chromebooks that have been end of life for a few years. You can use it just as before, you just no longer get updates.

devjab 3y ago

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.

lnsru 3y ago
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.
- Avamander 3y ago
  All you have to do is not force your stuff to become waste. It doesn't mean major updates, but updating e.g. openssl shouldn't be that hard. If you can't guarantee that then why should the EU guarantee a market (and recycling) for your product? It's not fair.
  - wiz21c 3y ago
    If (for example) Debian can do it, I'm sure Google can. They just have to leave their platforms open. It's not like it's expensive.
- matthewmacleod 3y ago
  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?

pkaye 3y ago

Do these Chromebooks stop working or just no updates?

II2II 3y ago
Having dealt with this in the past: they just drop updates. That includes dropping support for the browser.

bullen 3y ago

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? When you abandon HTTP, you are lost forever. See it's all the same thing. YC if you understand go back to HTTP (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2289 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2289) for HN.

quickthrower2 3y ago

https://ubuntu.com/blog/tutorial-install-ubuntu-on-a-chromebook https://ubuntu.com/blog/tutorial-install-ubuntu-on-a-chromeb...

xet7 3y ago
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. https://github.com/xet7/chromebook https://github.com/xet7/chromebook

raincole 3y ago

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.

mobilio 3y ago
Chromebook continue to work as-is. Just remain forever on version X. You can still use it. You can install Linux after that.
- modeless 3y ago
  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.

bnebxv 3y ago

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 ...

SargeDebian 3y ago
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.
- putzxcv 3y ago
  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.
  - ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
    Don't know if it's paid vacation, but part of the monthly salary is reserved to pay out next years vacation
  - pjc50 3y ago
    > the installation should happen in class Class time is far too valuable for this kind of nonsense.
  - Claude_Shannon 3y ago
    At least in Poland even during vacation they are required to be at school for administrative reasons. Doing nothing, but still forced to be there.

zokier 3y ago

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.

captn3m0 3y ago
Folks raised similar cries around Pixel 3 and 4 EOL. Google doesn’t budge.
- unaindz 3y ago
  The consumers being schools should have more power behind than the consumers of Pixels. Maybe it doesn't matter anyways but it's worth a try.
- spiffytech 3y ago
  Pixel 6 and later moved the EOL from 3 years to 5. That's still imperfect, and remains less than iPhone, but it's a step.
  - isaacremuant 3y ago
    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.
  - alok-g 3y ago

self_awareness 3y ago

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.

modeless 3y ago
Yes. You can install Linux, or even Chrome OS Flex or Chromium OS.

duckmysick 3y ago

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?

benplumley 3y ago
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.
- chongli 3y ago
  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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_device_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_device_management
- wildrhythms 3y ago
  None of these K-12 schools or teachers are going to pay for 30+ USB drives for students.
- presbyterian 3y ago
  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.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  > You get usable laptops [citation needed]; how many bricks can you expect from having middle-schoolers monkey around with low-level firmware stuff?

avgcorrection 3y ago

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.

rob74 3y ago
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...

megous 3y ago

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.

solardev 3y ago
Yeah. This seems like a 15-min fix vs trying to get 10,000 signatures to petition Google's deaf ears. The laptops still work fine, despite being 7 years old. It's their own stupid test environment that's an issue.

footlose_3815 3y ago

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.

liquidpele 3y ago

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.

linsomniac 3y ago

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.

deleted 3y ago

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paxys 3y ago

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.

mcherm 3y ago
> 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.
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  >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? Feel free to expand this to a national level.
- paxys 3y ago
  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.
aldarisbm 3y ago
Is this truly your take on it?

znpy 3y ago

But Sundar really needs that sweet sweet cash influx from parents getting new chromebooks for their children.

ecshafer 3y ago

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.

rejectfinite 3y ago

wow those dates.. I am using a 2014 desktop, an i7, running Windows 10 just fine. Still game on it too. Insane by Google

joshstrange 3y ago

> 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.

CatWChainsaw 3y ago
What's the alternative, Microsoft Surface?
- joshstrange 3y ago
  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).
  - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    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.