Built-in software ‘death dates’ are sending thousands of schools’ Chromebooks to the recycling bin

UngodlyAudrey🏳️‍⚧️@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 776 points –
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".

299

You are viewing a single comment

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.

Really? I just handed down a 2017 MacBook Pro -- still supported by Apple, meaning it runs the latest OS, and gets patches.

Can you give me an example of any other device with longer software support from the original vendor, at no cost to the end user?