There are few things quite as emblematic of late stage capitalism than the concept of “planned obsolescence”.
Awful!!! I remember using those junktops when I was in high school…
Made me realize I still have one lying around and I tried to put Linux on it, but they seem to only let you sandbox Linux in it…? Not able to enter BIOS supposedly due to the firmware is obnoxious. Is there any way to put coreboot on over the firmware or something?
At a guess - they’re likely selling those laptops at a loss and making the money back on (hopefully) service contracts or (probably) selling your data. As soon as you install a custom OS they won’t support you (so you won’t buy support) and they won’t be able to sell your data.
Most Chromebook’s firmware is Coreboot, but it’s running a Depthcharge payload instead of UEFI (or BIOS or whatever). Mr. Chromebox maintains UEFI Coreboot payloads and install tools for a wide variety of (x86) Chromebooks, which can be used to flash a normal UEFI payload and boot normal OSes. It’s strictly possible to boot normal Linux systems on a the Depthcharge payload modern Chromebooks use, but uh… here’s the gentoo wiki on it, it’s a substantial pain in the ass.
Yep I did that to my school Chromebook, they never asked for it back when I graduated and being a broke college student I decided to UEFI flash it and use it as a cheap Linux Computer, still using it now. It’s not the fastest laptop but it’s certainly good enough. It’s really dumb that they enforce software expiration dates on these PCs when they’re probably fully capable of running the next version perfectly fine.
Chromebooks expire? What the fuck? Are there logistical problems with installing Linux on these devices?
Chromebooks are unfortunately meant to be disposable like phones. Nobody should buy one, but unfortunately schools get them because they’re cheap.
On an individual basis you can install Linux, but for millions of devices thrown out by schools around the world, there’s no solution because the residual value is so tiny, you’d have to pay the techs minimum wage and hold a gun to their heads to get enough devices per hour to justify it.
I used to work at a refurb place and when we saw a chromebook that wasn’t immediately OK (it could’ve had a bad display or keyboard, or locked to an account), we just removed the eMMC, smashed the chip and threw the device on our scrap pallet.
Phones shouldn’t be disposable either, I’m coming up on five years on mine.
They shouldn’t be, but they’re designed to be, especially Androids with their abysmal software support period.
I guess mine is unusual then. I still get very regular security updates, and battery life though noticeably shorter, well, it’s still okay.
Give them to the kids with a QR code guide sticker about installing Linux on them? I’m not a kid, but I would love if someone “threw” a couple of these in my general direction.
Almost certainly not allowed, schools are responsible for privacy and security on these devices.
Any standard desktop linux is more private and secure than google spyware
And as soon as the IT guy at school installs Linux on these machines, he’s responsible for said privacy and security. And he’s a lot easier to sue than Google if something goes wrong.
This is exactly why right here, cost aside.
I would not hand out hundreds of Chromebooks to kids running some Linux distro I installed even if I could. It’s critical to have full manufacturer support in these types of environments.
Most of these Chromebooks are 3-4 years old and in really rough shape. Kids use these things for literally everything. You likely wouldn’t even want them for free. Probably bio-waste at this point.
A friend asked me to fix their daughter’s desktop and also asked if she could borrow an old laptop to use in the meantime. The desktop was disgusting with food smeared all over the keys and display. I cleaned it up and fixed it and sent it back. My laptop was returned with food smeared everywhere after just a few days. I was stunned.
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.
-
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
Not sure why everyone is so upset
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 :)
I’ve been looking into getting a cheapo laptop to take outside, and Chromebooks caught my interest. However, literally everyone I spoke to about this idea recommended against it. After researching all the nuances to putting baremetal Linux on a $40 Chromebook (BIOS screws, firmware patches, etc), all so I could have 2GiB RAM and 16GiB of unreplaceable storage, I asked myself what the point even was. I might as well buy a(nother) Thinkpad T40 at that point.
Glad I didn’t go with the Chromebook. Got a 2018 HP secondhand from a local college. For a little extra money, I have something with superior construction, specs, and upgrade potential.
I was part of one of the first high school classes in the country to get chromebooks and oh boy were they AWFUL. Constant freezing, crashes, failure to boot them, all kinds of battery issues. For about six months we had teachers who relentlessly put their tests online and had us take t them on our chromebooks, but eventually most of them switched to paper because of the inevitable three-or-so students who would go “mine’s not turning on” or “the screen’s broken.” They were fragile as hell too. The school said we’d lose our warranty if we were caught using them without the case, but even when they were inside the case they would regularly come out with cracked screens and broken keys. The internet speed on them was atrocious too. Our school wasn’t known for ultra fast internet (in fact, some spots even were a cellphone data dead spot), but we had more than a dozen incidents of students using their phones to do assignments because the chromebook just wasn’t connecting. The school had one IT technician and four librarians for a school of about 750, and they were working pretty much overtime due to how often the chromebooks would break.
I remember at the start they said we only had one free repair and then every repair after that would cost us $50, but the school had to change it to 3 free repairs because everybody’s chromebook (including mine) broke.
Used laptops are the shit for basic web browsing.
I just found a Lenovo T470s at a flea market (Flea@MIT, for anyone in the Boston area), 6th gen i5, 2x4GB RAM, and 128GB NVMe, with charger and W10 license…for $100.
I bought a 1TB NVMe and a 16GB SODIMM for like $80. Dual-booting Fedora and W10 (fresh-installed…I don’t trust someone else’s installation). Since getting it (Fathers Day), I only needed Windows one time (Linux Fire Toolbox wasn’t working too well for me with my Prime-Day Kindle Fire).
As a plus, the battery life is supreme as well, and upgrading the ram and NVMe were stupid simple, as they are on most the Lenovo T-series.
Planned Obsolesce should be a crime
I would have agreed with that statement until I saw the most recent Technology Connections video about why the incandescent light bulb has planned obsolescence built in. Sometimes it’s not malicious but to actually provide a compromise leading to an overall better product.
I don’t think software death dates count, tho.
Light bulbs aren’t planned obsolescence though, he even said as much in the video, light bulbs more akin to dish-soap which eventually runs out then a device made to be obsolete faster. They are consumable items, which run out or burn out, they are not expensive appliances with long lives, hell he even pointed out that some utilities gave them away for free.
but to actually provide a compromise leading to an overall better product.
Could you elaborate a bit more on that?
For incandescent lightbulbs, his point was that bulbs can burn fast and bright or low and slow, and standardizing on a lifespan of 1000 hours was a sweet spot between performance and longevity. For example, it makes 60W bulbs from different manufacturers more interchangeable and less prone to tricky marketing gimmicks like a “long life” 60W bulb that’s dimmer.
Thank you for explaining this concept. I still don’t see how it can be considered planned obsolescence, though. It looks more like a matter of optimizing the output and doing a tradeoff for more performance.
I see planned obsolescence as artificially limiting the longevity or repairability of a product, without any benefit at all, but with the intention of making it less durable. A good example could be locked smartphones without updates.
But perhaps, the definition of planned obsolescence is broader than i think.
That wasn’t planned obsolescence though, it was an industry-created standard for the tradeoff between efficiency, brightness, and lifespan. Planned obsolescence is specifically when a product is made to break sooner than it needs to.
Software Death Dates strike me as more “Malware” than “Compromise”
Hey Mike Judge should make a movie about this
I love this, the idea that the hardware is done once the software gives out is asinine. It’s also what companies have been selling us on for decades now. It’s long past time to rethink the idea of what hardware lifespan really looks like
That’s what they should be doing, but it isn’t what they’re going to do, unfortunately.
Kimathi Bradford, a 16-year-old Oakland tech repair intern, has looked into whether there was a way to replace the outdated Chromebook software with a non-Google brand, but it ended up being a lot of work, Kimathi said, and the open-source replacement wasn’t up to par. “It’s like the Fritos of software,” he said. “No one really wants to use it.”
Now, I’m not sure if what they tried was Linux, but I wouldn’t be too surprised. The younger generations grew up with smartphones; I feel as though operating systems will become more streamlined and opaque as time goes on. I suspect we’ll have to contend with the phonification of mainstream computing in the coming years.
It’s not a sensible path for a school with budget constraints (which is most schools). They would need to come up with a new MDM solution because they can’t manage their computers with Google anymore. So their IT costs would increase dramatically, probably more money than they would save by keeping the old hardware alive. The simplest path forward is to just buy new Chromebooks.
I haven’t (will never) had the experience of owning chromebook as a student, what does the MDM will do here? Cheating prevention?
It grants the IT department authority over the devices. Restricting unauthorized changes like adding new accounts, adding new software, removing existing software, allows for tracking of the devices and sometimes remote wiping in case the device is stolen or lost and valuable data is on the device, among other things.
Less to do with cheating and more to do with control over the device since it’s the school’s property. Preventing cheating is an afterthought of MDM (mobile device management).
I wonder what it would look like without these measures?
Back in My Day™, we had minimal MDM on the school computers.
Yes, the kids that wanted to fuck around (look at porn, download music, play games) fucked around, but they would have the old-fashioned way, anyway. The most common thing was just changing the desktop photo to a Lamborghini, or something. Anyway, we turned out…. Well… not necessarily ok, but I don’t fault the computers for lack thereof where applicable.
Admittedly, these weren’t personal laptops but just ones in the library or computer labs, but still.
Mobile Device Management, aka the administering of software to a fleet of devices.
“being a lot of work” = I couldn’t follow a guide.
Honestly, Chromebooks are among some of the easiest systems to boot a Linux distro on. Far easier than, say, Bootcamp.
- Exceptions apply to enterprise or education enrolled systems as they lock those devices down. Corporations and schools, however, do have the option to release the hardware and allow modifications to the system.
Right, but then multiply that guide x1000 systems, losing google enterprise, switching over to a unix directory system, setting up infrastructure, network shares, printers, and everything and it’s not just a guide - it’s a team of people working for weeks to get it set up. Of course to us it’s easy, it’d just be a computer or two. To an entire company/school it may be over a million dollars to swap over
Agree. I’ve got a chromebook running Linux, for that I had to open it up and remove a screw. It takes around 15 minutes if you’ve done it before, so for bulk migration to Linux it’s not feasible.
You had to remove a screw to install Linux? Is that like a physical tampering prevention measure? Makes me think of how I had to swap a jumper to install a GPU in an old HP tower that had integrated video.
Yes it’s exactly that, check out this documentation.
You’re saying it’s over a million dollars to revive some chromebooks? Or to build out a system that is independent from planned obsolescence? For a school district that has to operate in the long term, I think one of those is a bargain.
Also, the cost of maintaining 2 vs 1000 systems obviously scales up, but it’s obviously not nearly linear. The difference in cost between managing 1000 and 2000 systems would be negligible.
The plan on a large scale with a team sounds good, but IT at schools is a total mixed bag due to budget, etc. I’ve seen some schools where IT is just burnt out and underpaid (can’t tell which came first) and sometimes the IT team will be an old head that still reminisces about Windows NT.
It would be cool if there was an independent team that resurrected those laptops for schools. I think the problem that arises though is security.
Right, for a huge enterprise they would probably honestly consider it, but a school with ~1000 students? Less? It’s going to be cheaper to trash those and get new ones. Don’t get me wrong I think it’s a terrible waste and Google is horrible for putting them in this situation, and I’d love for the open source community to offer some scripts for wiping, installing ubuntu, setting up ACLs, connecting to a domain, connecting shares, etc, but still most schools are going to see this and just say “Okay google how much money do you need for us to keep working?”
Sorry but Fritos of software is dumb & in no way representative of bringing old chromebooks back to life beyond their support date.
Schools often buy the bottom baseline of everything & in now way was a 4gb of ram a good, decent or proper experience to begin w/ & their replacements probably also had 4gb of ram - just a faster cpu, gpu & ram to hide that it’s lacking ram still.
I think schools could easily band together & make their own education focused Linux distro & then just focus on hardware that’s compatible w/ that’s Chromebooks or Windows laptops. Hard part would be building out an on par MDM &/or ldap server if not using a Windows server.
All Chromebook are is a browser basically. It already is the bag of Fritos imho. I think the hard part though would be to hire an IT guy that knows Linux better than the students tbh. Schools already under pay teachers in the US & that goes 2-3x for IT staff.
I mean, underpaid IT aside, do they need to be better than the students?
We like to organize school like there’s rules, you follow them, and if you do better it must be because you are better.
But thats not how the world works, and it’s not how technology works - it’s all about understanding the system and looking for loopholes
Is it better to enforce absolute control though? It teaches you nothing but how to be a good cog in the machine.
Teaching you that the rules aren’t absolute, but requires skill and legwork gives you a mindset to actually succeed in our warped little resource allocation game. Instead you should teach them to consider the effects - if they crash the network, make school suck for everyone for a few days.
But as to your original point, you still need an admin who can at least manage the network, and they should be given the funds to pay for that
What kind of monster doesn’t like Fritos?
I’ve heard of CS majors coming in these days not knowing what a filesystem is.
so they think that reformatting is wiping the drive clean instead of recreating ntfs/exfat metadata files
A decade or more of kids growing up with shitty toy computers instead of real computers will do that. Mobile OSes, in their ridiculous pursuit to dumb down the computing experience, have dumbed down the computer users.
There seems to be a sweet spot in age where you grew up with actual computer experience. Young enough to actually grow up with computers in your household and school but old enough for those computers to not be toy mobile crap.
I’m very glad mobile Linux phones exist now. Having a real computer in my pocket rather than some awful imitation of what a computer should be is refreshing. I always wanted a pocket computer as a kid, but then when it actually happened it felt nothing like a computer unless you hacked it.
The first PC my family had, and thus first computer I had extensive experience with, was a Dell Pentium 4 running XP. Yeah, obviously I used a file system implicitly, but I remember thinking later when I entered college and the workforce that I was deprived of learning how to use a “real” computer because I didn’t get to experience the consumer PCs of the 80s. I didn’t have experience with a C64, I didn’t need to learn BASIC or a command line just to use the computer. As a user, understanding how reads and writes to disk happened, and how to make the best use of my working memory wasn’t necessary, the OS handled it all. I just needed to know to click “eject” first. And yet I’m doing fine (I think :D).
My point is, every generation will be able to say “I grew up with a dumbed down computing experience”. But I’m more optimistic about this I think. I welcome a generation of computer scientists who think completely differently about how files should be organized. It’s not important that I know BASIC, and maybe it’s not important that today’s students think in terms of file systems. They’re still smart people, they’ll still need to learn trees and graphs to solve problems. They just won’t be pre-programmed with assumptions and requirements that may not exist anymore or in future hardware.
2023 python programmers not understanding why you need to use the context manager when you open files (or not learning c++ first) “whats a file socket?” “why do exceptions mess everything up” “__exit__ worse than c++ destructors” (if they even know dunder methods and didn’t have python as a first language) “whats the big deal if you don’t close a file”
As a lover of Frito pie, I take offense to this
I take offense to the idea that there is something called Frito pie, and worse, that your comment leads us to believe, hopefully errantly, that somebody has concocted such an abomination.
Why would you subject yourself to eating something that’s famous for smelling like the bacteria that festers between dogs’ toes: https://be.chewy.com/is-this-normal-why-do-my-dogs-feet-smell-like-fritos/
ok I’ll bite, can’t they reinstall the chromebooks with linux instead?
Sure, but then they have to pay the salaries of an IT department to not only do the OS install on thousands of devices, but also provide support when things go wonky from kids doing dumb shit (it’s Linux; there will be that one kid who figures out how to gain su privileges and convinces a couple others to rm -f / their shit). The same thought crossed my mind, but these are low spec $200 laptops that I really don’t think it would be financially viable to do so.
Teach the kids to do it themselves - this allergy towards teaching any kind of computer skills these days is ridiculous.
There’s a pretty wide distinction between navigating a linear OS like Windows and OSX, and a flavor of Linux, especially if the teacher isn’t familiar with it themselves.
I’m currently in the market for something like a Chromebook but I’m not buying one because of stuff like this.
If you want a fancy Chromebook, there’s the Framework Chromebook (or you could just get the regular Framework laptops)
I am very happy using a surface go with Linux (used arch with GNOME for a while, now trying out KDE Neon for a change).
Lenovo yoga 11e, with linux. They’re like 250 bucks and a great value. Tablet mode too. I prefer mine to my better laptops, honestly, because I don’t have to worry about it at all.
After reading all the comments, I’m just gonna say that if you don’t allow kids to tinker and do their thing, they will learn a lot slower and your “investment” will be left mostly unused. (age range proper hardware/OS of course.) The school policy is not doing the kids a favor, it’s a waste of time and tax money that you cultivate a generation of people get used to chrome book and google apps. That’s the ultimate purpose for school license being cheaper.
We’ve got young adults entering the workforce that cannot comprehend what a filesystem and directory structure is due to 10+ years of these sandboxed, guard-railed tech products.
I now understand that existential crisis that people become too dumb or not capable of operating technologies developed by previous generation.(like the Walle movie.)
still using things like Google Chrome or Chromebooks in 2023 is actually reckless behaviour. stuff like manifest v3 and the web integrity api just prove that google will use their monopoly to take over the open internet
Yes, why have we as a society allowed Google of all companies to take over something as important as public education? It’s downright dystopian.
Honestly people should stop buying Google products…
Comments upon comments ignorant of the realities of the privacy laws governing this domain and the implications on firmware, driver and OS security support. “Just install Linux on it” is a completely unworkable solution. As some have pointed out, the places where this is done have a much thicker IT departments staffed with higher grade professionals to make it work. The thing to be mad here about is the shit support from vendors across the stack. If I had to guess, the worst offenders are probably the SoC vendors who typically ship firmware and driver updates as is the tradition.
I mean, even if just installing a different OS were an option, you’d need to install and setup that OS on a few hundred computers or more. I used to work for a place that would essentially do the enterprise enrollment in bulk before shipping off the computers to schools. I could only setup a bit under 100 over an 8 hour workday, assuming no major issues (like captchas on the login step, or the wifi going out). Keep in mind that we also had specialized little microcontroller* USBs specifically for doing all the enrollment keypresses, and enough of those for someone to setup multiple computers at once.
I am actually curious as to how you would make a locked down managed linux OS akin to ChromeOS. Maybe there would be a way to do something like that that’s also faster to setup, but idk.
*centipedes are the name for the ones we used.
That’s exactly the problem. The standard GNU/Linux distro isn’t suitable to allow carrying the responsibility that an innumerable number of users with physical access won’t be able to pwn those machines. Machines that are used by others too. You absolutely can make an OS like that out of Debian or Ubuntu, or what have you. Google has - Chrome OS - but it’ll take a significant development effort. You’d have to basically redo at least some of the work they’ve done. And let’s say you did all of that. Then you end up deploying it on an ARM-based fleet. And there’s a wild vulnerability in the WiFi firmware blob, and the SoC vendor no longer supports it. Every student has root and we’re back to the original problem. 👨🚀🔫
And that’s why instead of getting hardware from a vendor and hoping for the best, you might want to get it in writing that they’ll support their crap till a date. Then you stamp that as the EOL date for that laptop and you present it as part of the spec to whoever might want to buy this laptop. There’s no escaping this problem unless there are no proprietary blobs on the system, which is unlikely for ARM, or you have a solid development team and you’re large enough to have a source sharing contract with the vendor that lets your team fix the vulnerabilities and support the hardware for as long as you like. It’s probably much easier to achieve on x86, which costs more per unit up front.
Thank you for sharing your experience along with that link.
I am actually curious as to how you would make a locked down managed linux OS akin to ChromeOS.
Because Linus Torvalds stupidly refused to change the Linux license to GPL3.
What difference would the kernel licence make in this context?
Yeah, bulk imaging computers is really only limited to how many you can hook up to the network. I used to have to image hundreds of computers a day at times, and really the longest part was walking around and restarting them all so they’d PXE boot. The actual process maybe took 2 hours since all the computers were on 100Mb/s connections.
I converted one of these Chromebooks to Linux as a test project and the results were, not good.
To start, they have a bootloader lock screw under the motherboard, so you have to take the entire laptop apart to load anything but unsupported ChromeOS.
Then you have to use a Google tool, can’t remember the specific one, to swap the bootloader. That might be possible to automate but I didn’t look into it because…
… The hardware sucks. We’re talking like 4GB of storage on a lot of these Chromebooks. The driver support is all over the place, and there are issues everywhere even on “supported” distros.
With the vast amount of junk Chromebooks out there, I’m sure community hospice support will get better, but it’s never going to be an easy bulk conversion because of how common the bootloader locks are.
Companies making mass market devices should be required by law to support them indefinitely, or until they publish the technical specs sufficient for community support and repair.
The upgrade cycle they’re allowed to get away with today is not only a ridiculous drain on people’s money, but also a shameful source of pollution and waste.
until they publish the technical specs sufficient for community support and repair.
I want to see phones with no further official OS support have their boot loaders opened up so a lightweight OS can be installed on them instead. I’ve had iPhones in the past that have been absolutely rock solid after a battery replacement that lost iOS support, and with that a whole bunch of resale value. So I now tend to sell mine a year or so before they’re likely to be dropped.
But I genuinely think that I’d hold on to an iPhone that could have an alternative OS installed. This is, of course, why none of the major manufacturers allow this. Gotta put the profits ahead of the ethics.
Exactly, bootloader locking should be downright illegal. If EU wants to make phones last, they need to mandate that you can unlock the bootloader (WITHOUT bullshit like having to get an unlock code from the manufacturer). Want to lock it down for certain software features like payments, etc? Ok, fine, I can live with that, so long as I can unlock it if I so choose and keep all HARDWARE functionality intact.
On another note, the manufacturers should be upstreaming and mainlining their drivers in the Linux kernel. ChromeOS and Android are both built on Linux, yet they keep all their hardware support in forks and branches that are left to wither and die rather than submitting those changes upstream. Only a select few ARM SoCs have mainline support. If the companies would just put a bit of extra effort into doing things right rather than the shitty hack jobs they do now to get products out the door as fast as possible, we could have a much better ecosystem around old phones. Of course, the shittiness is by design.
Actually in the Android community Sony helps you unlock your bootloader and offers official AOSP sources for their devices that you can compile and install yourself.
I have no idea why people are enamored with Samsung.
Ad campaigns, most likely. I always seem to see ads for Samsung phones, but not as often for Sony brand ones. I do agree Sony does a much better job about opening up the bootloader, versus Samsung punishing you for trying to open your own paid for device up.
I have preordered a framework laptop which will run Linux until it fucking blows up or falls apart.
Enough with being screwed over by well known brands whose interest is just selling you more and more stuff.
