As far as I know there's an even shorter shelf life beyond the software Chromebooks run. Which is their flash memory and RAM. Those components are almost always

As far as I know there's an even shorter shelf life beyond the software Chromebooks run. Which is their flash memory and RAM. Those components are almost always soldered to the board as part of the Chromebook specifications, meaning if Google pushes a ChromeOS update that exceeds the 2-4GB of RAM these all ship with (you can easily exceed the 4GB by just leaving ten Youtube tabs open with adblock running for about two hours), that means it's constantly pushing into swap memory. Even worse, if the flash memory on the SSD burns out because ChromeOS has been constantly writing to the swap the entire thing is dead. This is a much rarer and thus smaller concern these days considering the push for SSD reliability, but for everyone except those with soldering or reflowing skills once the onboard storage is dead the device is effectively bricked.