There are few things quite as emblematic of late stage capitalism than the concept of “planned obsolescence”.
The service life of the devices was known up-front. You can check for yourself the service life dates of every Chrome OS machine here:
https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en
The correct deployment strategy would be to make a big purchase at the front end of a device’s lifecycle and then only replacements from then on out so that you get the most out of every machine. Future capital purchases would be with a new device and termination date.
I think this point is really important, and allow me to go one step further: I work in the public sector of education and purchasing technology is such a complex issue that IT governance has to be involved with decisions like this. That’s to say that, without a governing body to review purchases (outside of whoever handles the actual procurement, i.e. funds leaving the bank account), mistakes like this will happen.
We can be upset with planned obsolescence, but there’s distinctly a human error here where there wasn’t enough research and planning.
My 15 years old Linux laptop can still do everything (except gaming new titles)
Chromebooks expire? What the fuck? Are there logistical problems with installing Linux on these devices?
I manage my schools IT - and when we started out a few years ago my board were pushing aggressively for Chromebooks. The service provider were talking about how they could roll out hundreds of Chromebooks at the touch of a button. When I asked about the lifespan of a Chromebook I got vague answers. I knew we would get a couple of years max out of each one so I instead pushed for much more expensive MacBooks. 5 years on and we are still using our original MacBook we got back then, with photoshop and other software.
x86 Macs are not the greatest example of longevity at this point.
Not ideal that we had a percentage of our MacBooks on x86 cpus when the M1’s came out. But I will say they are still running strong. Others have pointed out that newer OS updates won’t work on the older MacBooks. But that’s not a deal breaker for us as we don’t run anything that’s OS specific enough to make the older models obsolete. We have factored in 5 - 7 years of use out of the laptops and we’re on course for that. I myself and using a 10 year old MacBook at home, and although I can’t fire up the latest Adobe Premiere on it, I can certainly get 99% of my work done on it.
Honestly people should stop buying Google products…
Why are schools pushing so hard for enslaved Linux laptops?
All of these machines make for decent Linux laptops. I picked up an EOL Chromebook for $35 last year and installed Debian on it. Decent little machine. Not terribly fast but very useable.
These are Linux laptops. But yes, they’ll work better if you put your preferred distro on them.
I’m currently in the market for something like a Chromebook but I’m not buying one because of stuff like this.
I am very happy using a surface go with Linux (used arch with GNOME for a while, now trying out KDE Neon for a change).
Anyone got a non-paywalled version of the article?
Sorry! I didn’t realize it was paywalled because I could see the whole thing. Hopefully this should work:
This sounds like there’s a market for a Linux distro that behaves like ChromeOS and can be centrally managed.
