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

Re:Speaking as a chromebook user

[Anonymous Coward]

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 don't see the problem with this.

It's because of people like you that we're overrun by hardware in dumps all over the world.

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.