There are few things quite as emblematic of late stage capitalism than the concept of “planned obsolescence”.
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Kimathi Bradford, a 16-year-old Oakland tech repair intern, has looked into whether there was a way to replace the outdated Chromebook software with a non-Google brand, but it ended up being a lot of work, Kimathi said, and the open-source replacement wasn’t up to par.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.
“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.
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.
Apple does the same thing if you don’t already have those installed
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.
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.
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.