Built-in software ‘death dates’ are sending thousands of schools’ Chromebooks to the recycling bin
mercurynews.com
There are few things quite as emblematic of late stage capitalism than the concept of "planned obsolescence".
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Not sure why everyone is so upset. This is nothing new. Has been happening for years with phones and tablets. They get at least 5 years of updates, which I think is pretty good. My kids have had the same CBs at their schools for 6 years and still going strong. Some of my laptops don't last that long.
Because it's upsetting. The fact that it has been upsetting for years doesn't make it no longer upsetting.
The attitude that old news shouldn't be upsetting enables upsetting behavior. And, quite frankly, I find that upsetting :-)
I agree it could be better. But there's nothing I can do about it so I've learnt to not get upset by such things. I can't get upset by everything.
Fair, but I'm just saying, we can still catagorize upsetting things as upsetting, even if, personally, we've achieved equanimity with respect to our inability to effect any immediate change.
Agreed, well said :)
To me it isn't acceptable that phones and tablets have that problem too, especially devices that could still have a decent performance.
Windows has a lot of problems, but at least if you have Windows you will be supported for a long while, even if it gets slow due to Windows being Windows. Considering ChromeOS frames itself as a competitor of especially low end Windows, and that ChromeOS is more optimized than Windows, I would expect more.
EDIT: The article says three to six years, and that they stop functioning. That's even worse.
EDIT2: And like most phones, you can't flash another OS to most chromebooks.
I agree it's not nice, some phones are abandoned within a year or two.
I believe the CB will just stop receiving updates, it will still work. Over time there may come issues due to missing updates.
5 years is shit. People have been conditioned over the past 10-15 years to think that the mobile way of doing this is the correct way. Before that, your PC was an open system that you could upgrade and update until it was incapable of running the latest software due to hardware limitations (not enough RAM, GPU API level, processor extensions, etc). These days the mobile companies have convinced people that none of that matters. The software is so intrinsically tied to the hardware that even if the hardware is not much different to the new hardware, the new software won't work.
A 15 year old PC can still do a lot of work on a modern OS these days. Why can't a 6 year old phone? Because the people who want you to buy a new phone said so.
Not even that, computers don't work wit enough CPU, GPU RAM, are easily interchangeable