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.

Comments

Fairly generous?

[Gadget_Guy]

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.

Re:Fairly generous?

[ThosLives]

I agree - as a consumer it would be great to see computers (and electronics in general, including software) have to provide the same support lifetimes as, say, automobiles or aircraft. (I admit I don't know how much of this is regulation and how much is de-facto in those industries; e.g., you wouldn't last long as an auto manufacturer if you repair parts for your car were unavailable after 5 years.)

It's kind of a shame that other industries have product support regulations, but software / computers don't seem to.

From a developer standpoint though, I can see this being a bit of a pain, because the trend now is so much for "disposable" short-term development cycles, rather than developing for the long-term. Part of the tradeoff between fast dev cycles and robustness. I think we've swung a bit too far to the "rapid" side of things, and need to go a little ways back to robust.

Re:Time to try out Linux on that laptop

[bluefoxlucid]

The RAM and CPU are usually BGA; the SSD is complex and prohibitive to BGA, so they use an MSATA. You can always pop in a 256GB Samsung EVO 850.

Re:Worried?

[DrXym]

Not necessarily.

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.

Re:Speaking as a chromebook user

[idontusenumbers]

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.

Re:Time to try out Linux on that laptop

[bill_mcgonigle]

The SSD shouldn't matter too much. That they're often ARM laptops with non-free hardware (video/wireless/touchpad, notably) is going to be a bigger issue.

I run CentOS 7 on my "chromebook" but it's an i3-based unit. And even at that, I have a bunch of customization on there to make the kernel/touchpad/video stable.

Re:Speaking as a chromebook user

[Anonymous Coward]

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.