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Built-in software ‘death dates’ are sending thousands of schools’ Chromebooks to the recycling bin (www.mercurynews.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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There are few things quite as emblematic of late stage capitalism than the concept of "planned obsolescence".

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

“These updates depend on many device-specific non-Google hardware and software providers that work with Google to provide the highest level of security and stability support,” said Peter Du, communications manager for ChromeOS. “For this reason, older Chrome devices cannot receive updates indefinitely to enable new OS and browser features.”

Bull. Shit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Weeell "bullshit" is easy to claim but not necessarily untrue. So with android phones this is definitely a problem. Industry wide firmware support for these ARM SOC-s are often ranging from not long enough, to fucking atrocious. You get basically two years of new drivers, and a security update maybe. The way LinageOS manages to support phones like the note 3, from like android 4, to 11, is basically creating manifests, that use drivers from newer, still supported, but "similar-ish" components. And the note 3 was a flagship device, easily the fastest phone of it's generation. These Chromebooks, especially the ones schools can and do afford, are built to the penny. There is ultimately no point in pushing a software update to a device for a significant cost, that makes it so slow that no reasonable person would ever consider using it.

What is the solution to this? Hard to say. Not buying hardware so incredibly obsolete that it has to run an alternate OS, is a start. Maybe just use PC-s and deploy linux.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I have an 8 year old iPad that can still use Amazon video and can still run Netflix, and google drops support for these computers as early as 3 years. I’m not an Apple fanboy but that is absolutely ridiculous.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Apple does the same thing if you don't already have those installed

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I will give credit to Apple on that one because android phone manufacturers are now supporting their phone for longer because of how long Apple is supporting them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I think the more probable reason is that EU regulators were unhappy with this for a long time and have now put 3 years of OS updates and 5 years of security updates into law. Low cost Android manufacturers don't care what Apple does.