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First Batch Of Chromebooks Reach End Of Life, To Stop Receiving Support and Updates (betanews.com)
An anonymous reader shares a BetaNews report:The original Chromebooks launched back in 2011 are reaching the end of their support cycle. With Google offering a fairly generous five years of support and updates, users have had a good run, but the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook is the first device to drop off the support list. Having been launched in August 2011, Acer AC700 Chromebook will be in a similar position in a couple of months. Google says that after five years, automatic updates are "no longer guaranteed". Interestingly, it has continued to provide updates to at least one of its own device that originated in 2010. It's not entirely clear what will happen by the end of this month, but if the company sticks to how it handles its smartphones, you should be worried.
I hear there are lots of distros to choose from.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
It's because of people like you that we're overrun by hardware in dumps all over the world.
If we were talking 2001, I would be inclined to agree. But these computers are only 5 years old. The socks I'm wearing are older than that.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Who knew, things get old, natural obsoletion happens...
Since when is five years considered fairly generous? Surely that would be the absolute minimum for supporting any software, let alone an operating system.
My aging Windows 7 notebook is still getting support, and will continue to be supported for quite some time now that I have done the free upgrade to Windows 10. Hell, even the old Vista notebooks that were passed on to me still get updates, although Windows Update is incredibly slow on them so I can't let it automatically check for them.
But I can (and do) run Windows 10 with absolutely no problem on a laptop from 2011.
+1
After suitable updates (bigger storage and RAM as needed/possible) if your Chromebook is ARM based, put Linux on it. If your Chromebook is intel based, put Linux or Win10 on it.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Many Chromebook applications are front ends to cloud based services. If Google decides to end of life one of those services then you're screwed. And this has happened before such as when YouTube end-of-lifed an older client API. So yeah your chromebook might work for a while and then gradually bitrot and break as one service after another is withdrawn.
Aside from the cloud services, chances are the browser will be start breaking over time too. Sites that expect chrome won't be happy about some 2 or 3 year old version and will start throwing up errors to upgrade and so on. Except of course you can't upgrade.
"The socks I'm wearing are older than that."
That says so much more about you than about Google
I never saw the fascination with a device that had so little storage I can't even run off the whole contents of my camera onto if I'm not connected to the web.
Cheap? Not really. Given that for another $100 I can get better specs, a real storage device, and an operating system that's $100 to buy (I realize some don't want Windows), the cost of a Chromebook is really expensive. Not to mention Google spying on you!
HexaByte - he's a square and a half!
My smart terminal - which is all a Chromebook is - is a 2006 era Windows XP machine (registry tweak for continued updates via Embedded track until ~2019).
My main workstation is a 2012 era PC which I've only upgraded by adding more RAM and an SSD.
Sorry, Google boys, but you can plan obsolescence all you want - in the end the consumer will get tired of that upgrade treadmill, just as they did with desktops and proper laptops.
SJW at it again. Once I dispose of something correctly, I have moral responsibility for it. Full stop. What happened to real men? Men who don't whine about this and that. Guys are supposed to work, come home, have their wives make them a meal, play with the children, hang out on the couch with said wife, have some raunchy sex and sleep. Lather, rinse, repeat. Real men don't worry about green this and that.
I bought a gas-powered lawn mower, a gas-powered weed eater, and a gas-powered car. I will continue to buy them, use chemicals on my grass, poison the insects in my yard. I'm a human, not a slave to "mother earth".
TFA states that the Chromebooks will continue to function - they just won't get updates. Assuming Google told people going in what the support term would be, I don't see the big deal.
But is is a reminder that paying $1200+ for one of those high-end Chromebooks might not have been a particularly wise choice.
#DeleteChrome
That should mean End of copyright privileges so that third parties can pick up where Google leaves off.
Regardless, what's the problem? Will it self destruct if you load a different OS? Even Windows doesn't need 32gb.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
It's more directly because of people that make laptops that fail after a year or two and that are so expensive to repair that it's cheaper to just buy a new one.
new batch of linux books on sale soon
Real Men don't post on Slashdot.
I comment occasionally so that I can mod others -1 overrated or -1 offtopic.
No, and I'm embarrassed for Slashdot when I see someone like you get modded up for posting nonsense. The laptops we replace don't go to recycling until they're useless as hand-me-downs. OP made this post to give Slashderpsters an opportunity to incoherently rage about an imagined controversy. Reactionary media has taught morons to feel entitled and upset, and to need to tell all of us how upset they are over their non-issues.
Once I dispose of something correctly, I have moral responsibility for it. Full stop
That makes no sense. Do you mean "I have no moral responsibility for it?"
Guys are supposed to work, come home, have their wives make them a meal
Ohh... so many problems with that one.
Why do we need support and updates on a Chromebook?
If we use them in our classrooms, and all our data is in the cloud,
then what is the downside. It's not like a virus or ransomware
is going to mess with a Chromebook.
Or can we expect the cloud to start locking us out through "feature" creep.
Chromebooks have support indefinitely thanks to Linux distributions like Crouton for Chromebook. Companies no longer have the option of planned obsolescence to stimulate sales, because the open source communist will pick up their slack and make OS updates and programs for older hardware. Read http://lifehacker.com/how-to-install-linux-on-a-chromebook-and-unlock-its-ful-509039343
This is how the year of Linux desktop finally happens!
Of course it does. It says NotDrWho is smart for choosing quality clothes that survive being worn and machine-washed hundreds of times, rather than cheap discount-store clothes that may not last even a hundred washes (two years).
That sort of depends on whether OP throws them away or sells them to someone who otherwise wouldn't have gotten a laptop at all.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
It's because of people like you that someone is wasting electricity trying to turn carbon dioxide into rocks.
Fun fact: A circa-1990 desktop PC consumed ~350-450 watts and was capable of fewer MIPS/watt than my Tegra K1 Chromebook is capable of producing at 15W.
I buy laptops to do work, not as sentimental discussion pieces so I can bore teenagers with anecdotes about my glory days sorting piles of punch cards that fell on the ground.
I've never owned an iPhone and I used my cell phones typically for ~4 years. I wear my shoes until there are holes in them. I also own several 7950 GPUs which I don't use for Litecoin mining any more because the cost of electricity to run them for a single month exceeds their cost of replacement. Would spiking my elelctric bill back up to $500/month worth of "global warming" by turning them back on as space heaters make your "reduce reuse recycle" pee pee hard?
1) Electronics waste-stream management is a cash cow for anyone willing to play with aqua regia, and the lack of workplace safety in 3rd World Countries is as much my fault as I am a beneficiary of interest on World Bank loans(which is: "not at all").
2) My time is more valuable than a cubic foot of real estate in a landfill. There is a unit of measurement which quantifies environmental cost known as "dollars". I don't survive off of photosynthesis so as long as this planet is burdened with my lungs sucking it's oxygen: I plan on converting "cow fat" in to "solutions to vexxing problems" in the most expedient way possible.
3) I support nuclear power(I could have no other talking points and still have moral superiority vs someone who is eco-conscious based on "feelings")
4) I don't plan on having any children, so my eco-footprint is already substantially lower than a breeder's(no matter how frequently I take 30-60 minute hot-showers)
So take that "Greener than thou" pedestal that you presume to be gazing down at me from and kindly shove it up your ass. Then lick my taint you hippie twat.
If you want to make a difference, study economics and then run for congress to correct the distortions on market prices which allow for economic externalities to be carried by anyone other than the person who produces them. In the mean time: I will spend as much of my money on whatever the fuck I want totally guilt free because I'm not a "shivering naked in the dark/living in a cave" eco-zealot who thinks windmills are bad because they kill birds and nuclear power plants are the worst thing ever because of "China Syndrome".
Asshole.
But not even the point where it stopped being developed (The embedded version was still available for what, 2 more years? Not including current deployments of either with the extended service contract.)
For commercial products the claim of 'discontinuing support' should be taken from either the last manufacture or the last sale of the product depending on whether it was continuous manufacture or batch manufacture for later sale (think RVs.)
Based on that, both google and microsoft should be expected to support their devices for at least 5 years after the last sale, not the *first* one.
Sheesh. If you wouldn't accept it for a car/appliance don't accept it for a computer/software!
2GB RAM, 16GB eMMC should be more than enough horsepower for a basic Linux distro running an XFCE, LXDE, or Mate DE. Heck, 1GB is enough for any of those DEs on my eight-year old Atom N270-powered netbook
Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
One more point: I've never thrown away a Chromebook! I hoard old laptops and turn them in to servers retard.
I do this despite the fact that I could probably accomplish the same task with a smaller electric bill each month by throwing them in the garbage and buying $45 Raspberry Pi equivalents. Do you intend to criticize me for doing exactly what you advocated for?
Enjoy not only being wrong, but being presumptuous as well!
Don't even try to claim "disposable" the adjective is the same thing as a verb. I never said I throw the devices away. I said that it would be economical to do so, thereby allowing me to use my laptops in a more haphazard manner.
Since you don't have "landfill scarcity" to lean on anymore: the only argument you have left to stand on is "conspicuous consumption is bad"(because: "dogma").
Consumer device purchases are the driving force behind the miniaturization of chip fabrication technology. By buying a new laptop every two years, and thousands of dollars in GPUs, I've helped make it more affordable to shrink 40nm processes down to 18nm, directly reducing the electricity expense for cloud server providers to run their data centers. Since data centers consume electricity full duty cycle, vs the intermittent use of consumer electronics: I'm directly applying downward pressure on Google and Amazon's data center electricity consumption.
Lick-lick-lick my balls!
OK, move along lady.
That's a load of crap and you know it. The driver towards the lower quality and expensive to repair isn't the disposable world at all. It's our desire to have smaller thinner faster with edge to edge display made entirely of glass like we're fighting blue beasts on Pandora because THAT is what we imagine the future to be. It's businesses that go to the likes of Dell and say we want 3000 computers but we don't want to pay anything for them. It's this idea that we should be detaching ourselves from the dying form factor of the laptop and migrating to slates.
What do you think is going to give?
What about the men who want their children and grand-children to inherit a world as good as today's? Because some of the predictions are down-right scary...
Same here. Also have it dual booting Win7 pro for the XP VM when needed.
It's sad I can't get the same software for 7 or 10 that runs so well on XP.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
My aging Windows 7 notebook is still getting support, and will continue to be supported for quite some time now that I have done the free upgrade to Windows 10.
+1 funny?
"My support for 7 is so thorough, it forced me to update to 10".
Support from my car manufacturer was so good, when it broke down, I got a free update to the bus!
Why should I care about the future generations? What the fuck have they ever done for me anyway?
What happened to real men?
They've all died of lung cancer.
this is clear artificial obsolescence. e.g.: chromebooks manufactured today are usually slower than ones from 2013. the ones from 2013 have 2955U CPU, which is a lot faster than today's n3050, n3060, etc CPUs. upcoming chromebooks with n3150 will finally be (tiny bit) faster. i am quite annoyed that slower chromebooks will receive updates for longer than mine.
it could also mean he has great many socks (and only gets to wear each pair once a month or so)
Many, many Google Software Projects get Shuttered before their time.
IIRC, Even Nexus Phones are only guaranteed 18 months of Android Support They could get up to 3 years; but might be as little as 18 months, depending.
Now this?
Meanwhile, my iPad 2 and iPhone 4s can load the latest version of iOS 9, and you can install the latest version of OS X, 10.11 El Capitan, on nearly any Mac from 2007-08 up.
for hardware designed for web-based services, which for the most part, will not see much need for increased specs within that time frame. should be 10 years or more.
Since 2004 I have been through 4 laptops, I used them until they are too broken or slow to be useful - Apple PowerBook G4, Toshiba Satellite, Lenovo ThinkPad T520s nothing wrong with this as I got a 2012 MacBook Pro used for 0$ - it suffers from the display image retention issue, its dented and beaten, got some sticky keys, but otherwise works fine.
In all I have spent about USD$5000 over 12 years on laptops.
An old chromebook with no support is as useless of a hand-me-down as there is.
If it were a Z80 luggable with CP/M floppies, at least some nutty vintage computer collector would take it off your hands.
"...lick my taint you hippie twat"
Ah, that brought back happy memories of alt.flame at its best. Bravo, and thanks.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
What is so technically different about the older CB's that they cannot run newer versions of ChromeOS? Seems like there are still pretty low-spec models for sale new.
It will get Windows 10 soon.
You can buy a second hand thinkpad from eBay for ball-park money that'll be orders of magnitude more powerful and useful than a locked-down Chromebook and it will easily out last physically and in terms of usefulness.
Chromebooks are just shitty vendor locked-in appliances, they are not computers.
Come on, give the coward a break. Someone has to support the broken window economy.
captcha: broker
Why should I care about the future generations? What the fuck have they ever done for me anyway?
I bet they can't wait until you're elderly and might need to be taken care of.
Spoken like a true macfag
This wouldn't matter so much if we just used reusable materials. Plastics that can be blended and reconstituted with 80% efficiency. There are organic chemical separation processes that can be used to regain the metals in all the electronics when the right foundation is used. But realizing this endless possibly leads to the inevitable outcome that the hardware is getting so small, you can't fill a dump with it if you tried. Anything is possible now. Like modular glass screens powered by sunlight and quantum mechanics that can reconnect or combine to perform any task you give it. The robots can clean up the trash we leave behind when we are colonizing other planets and have unlimited resources.
Or they're re-used by someone else. You are aware that there's a market for used hardware, right?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If the drivers are stable there is no reason not to continue allowing the devices to download updates. The only reasons to cut them off would be if a security risk was found in the drivers that would require too much effort to resolve or if the performance and resolution of the devices were not enough to run the newer/bloated software.
Real men understand ecology.
I don't think that's entirely true. I think it's more that a lot of people prefer a fanless Chromebook and that it's expensive to have the power of a Celeron or i3 in a fanless CPU (think HP Chromebook 13). Surfing the web doesn't require that high of an octane score anyways. Most of the Chromebooks with the Braswelll CPUs you listed have ~8k octane score, which is acceptable, but not super fast.
Seriously, this is an opportunity for Linux to step forward and provide lots of nice hardware for ppl.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"My support for 7 is so thorough, it forced me to update to 10".
My other Windows 7 computers are still being supported and will keep getting security upgrades until 2020. So no, I'm not being forced to upgrade to Windows 10. I'm just saying that the upgrade means that I get an additional 5 years of support, which brings the support for my computer up to what I call a generous 14 years.
news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9216357&cid=52281527
governments have your tax money and want to use it to fuck you up before it's totally worthless. Linus told them to fuck off.
I run Windows 10 on a 2008 Toshiba Tablet PC. So what is the problem?
Added more memory (has 6GB was 4GB), added 160GB SSD (had a 160GB disk) originally came with Vista. It still has the Vista sticker on it.
For POS, XP is even longer!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
You can pick up a replacement for less than $200.
Plus the cost of disposing of your e-waste.
It's not like a virus or ransomware is going to mess with a Chromebook.
It is if a computer intruder discovers a vulnerability in Chrome that Google refuses to patch on older devices.
Will it self destruct if you load a different OS?
No, but it will kill the "different OS" if you're not very careful.
Putting another operating system on a Chromebook requires switching from verification mode to developer mode. But every time you power on a Chromebook in developer mode, it displays a screen for 30 seconds begging the user to press Space to reenable verification (which wipes the drive). The screen can be skipped by pressing Ctrl+D, but if you're not the person who turns it on, the key that gets pressed won't be Ctrl+D. If someone else (such as wife or kid) turns it on and presses Space, under the mistaken impression that that's the correct button to push, all your work since your last backup is gone, and you are out the use of the laptop until you can make reinstallation media.
From the linked article on lifehacker.com:
Say someone other than you, such as a spouse or child, turns the laptop on and presses Space to re-enable verification during those 30 seconds. Guess what'll happen to your data.
It's because of people like you that we're overrun by hardware in dumps all over the world.
As if the poster purchases any more than those dying to have bleeding edge products.
I buy Chromebooks to serve as disposable laptops for 1-2 years. In practice: I replace mine once every 1-2 years with something newer/shinier.
I like the way you think. Purchasing budget systems more often results in more processing power than purchasing a state-of-the-art device every 5 years. Just consider the speed of processing, display quality and port speeds, and then do the math. A much slower PC purchased more often results in greater overall power and cost savings.