They are generally unlocked, you can easily get into developer mode and flash a new coreboot bios on most of them: https://mrchromebox.tech/#fwscript Once flashed they can boot right into Linux natively and are a regular old EFI booting laptop. You will never be able to run ChromeOS on it again though (and could perhaps permanently brick or destroy the device) so it's not something Google is going to tell people to do.
yup. this "arent built to last" quip feels like a reinforcement effort from on high to ensure planned obsolescence doesnt encounter any defeat along the way. total malarkey.
I run arch on a couple of chromebooks with wayland. the install path was pretty easy because under the hood these things are just computers. They last as long as you want them to because you decide what they do, not Google.
Yep and Linux usually runs perfectly well on Chromebooks since chrome OS is based on it so you rarely get weird bleeding edge opaque binary driver peripherals. My Acer Chromebook runs Arch too and everything works out of the box--wifi, sound, media buttons, etc. It's way better than getting Linux on a super cheap Windows laptop IMHO.
Wait. The whole reason that ChromeOS works correctly is because they are not doctrinaire about binary drivers. ChromeOS has working touchpads and working wifi and working webcams due to their acceptance of the need for vendor blobs.
Yeah but the peripheral has to have a Linux driver or support, and for a cheap laptop a manufacturer is definitely not going to hire someone to custom port a Windows driver to Linux. They're going to pull something off the shelf that already works with Linux.
But things like MIPI cameras don't work in any Linux other than ChromeOS. The open source partisans are still faffing around with their obsolete APIs, while ChromeOS discards the political aspect and just ships Intel's blob. That's why machines like the Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 10 are not on the ChromeOS Flex certified models list, and their webcams don't work in any other distro either, but there are tons of Chromebooks with MIPI cameras.
It sounds like Intel is dragging its feet releasing an open source driver for those cameras. But as usual if you use a bleeding edge distro like Arch it's just mashing in a few AURs and you'll have support: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=280559
The firmware's already open source, and you can reflash it by either opening the device to remove a write-protect screw (for older models) or with a debug cable. https://mrchromebox.tech/ has UEFI firmware for many models, and many also support BIOS boot without needing to remove a write-protect screw or use a debug cable. Also, all support running custom Chromium OS builds via the usual ChromeOS boot mechanism.
It's no different than the risk of upgrading your motherboard's bios. If the update fails to finish writing (like if the power goes out during the update) it will leave the firmware in a broken state and won't boot.
Some systems mitigate this risk by giving you two different bios regions so you can write to one and leave the other pristine as an emergency backup if the update fails. Other systems put the bios on a removable chip so if an update fails you can pull it out and rewrite it with dedicated hardware or another working computer.
For inexpensive laptops that are built to the cheapest price possible and where 99% of users will never mess with the bios they don't include those kind of features. So you just have to accept the risk that you could destroy the machine if the update fails, and try to take reasonable precautions like making sure the battery is charged up and it's plugged in while updating the firmware.
And also, it doesn't change that in the case of ARM Chromebooks, they run one hard branched Linux tree from 5+ years ago (more if you're dealing with Mediatek) and nothing else.
In daily use by children! Both of these articles, by the same author, fail to engage with the economic design point of the Chromebook. Only the most bozotic k-12 IT department is scrounging keyboards on eBay. The normal people bought their Chromebooks from CDW with 4-years repair or replace contracts, and they don’t care where the parts come from. And nobody wants to be upgrading machines piecemeal the way the author suggests. Absolutely nobody. You upgrade by replacing fleets.
Yeah. The article tosses out this one anecdote of a Windows laptop being easy to fix but I guarantee no K-12 IT department is doing bootleg ChromeBook repairs. Also the main alternative here is probably a tablet not a Windows much less a Linux laptop.
As for the life cycle I think laptops are on something like a 3 or 4 year refresh cycle where I work though in practice it’s pretty loose.
True for individuals who are unable to value their time, but I doubt you'd find an IT industry professional who agreed. You buy the machine with the support contract and you get the supported parts and you don't touch them. Modern designs don't even have replaceable RAM, for good reasons and not as some kind of conspiracy.
> True for individuals who are unable to value their time, but I doubt you'd find an IT industry professional who agreed.
Sure, if you value your time at hundreds of dollars for a 10min job. But most people would probably just call that delusional.
> Modern designs don't even have replaceable RAM, for good reasons and not as some kind of conspiracy.
Feel free to state them then. Because as a customer the most generous possible interpretation I can see would be that all manufacturers got a sudden bout of anorexia.
Well, like the article says the biggest issue is it's difficult to even get parts to repair them, I imagine most hardware used in schools will need some repairs in a few years, so having access to parts is important.
i have a number of laptops, purchased, new 250-300$ range, all ACER brand.
more than a decade old. worst problem is wearing a hole through the touchpad on my "console" machine.
just to be fair, kids are rough on stuff, especialy if they didnt pay for it.
Especially in the hands of students. My school deployed MacBook airs to everyone which are perfectly capable of lasting just about forever but a good chunk of them were dropped, destroyed, liquid damaged, etc by the end of the year.
Google extended the AUE to 8 years. They're complaining that most Chromebooks only have 4 years of software life left. Are they buying devices released 4 years ago? Or refurbished devices?
I bought a chromebook in 2017 that I love. AUE is up in a few months. The OS has improved leaps and bounds since I got it. I wish it would keep getting updates.
Sadly it’s hard to flash a new boot loader as the write protect screw is in a difficult place and I’ll likely break something trying to get to it. I don’t know what I’ll do when AUE hits.
I guess it’ll be like my first gen iPad which I’m forced to use as a clock as there is little else I can do with the great hardware with locked down software.
You should be able to disable write protection on the firmware flash using a suzyq cable to enable closed case debugging as well, and from there disable write protection. The screw is not the only way
"The sample size could have been larger". Yeah, like _way_ larger. So could the institutions represented. _Scarsdale_? Really? What about NYC, LA, Chicago? As others have written here, you would have to be insane to think a $200 device like that would last more than a couple of years. Or a school administrator who got and keeps their job by sucking up to an even more clueless district superintendent, under the not-so-watchful eye of an idiot school board. "A fool and his money are soon parted".
You can fix that by installing Linux. I'm talking about unavoidable stuff like firmware updates. Other manufacturers drop support for devices much sooner.
Yeah, the smartphone situation is quite dramatic. I was surprised to see GrapheneOS recommending Google phones but I bought a Pixel when I learned why.
Last BIOS and core chipset for my Type 34xx class X1 Carbon was September 2019, but they are still providing critical updates with eg both power and battery drivers + device diagnostics as recent as 5 days ago. This is through Lenovo Vantage.
Hardware works great still, thanks to my picking the top model then. Only the battery is pretty average, but you'd expect that. I'm going to say this is good support.
If you're using linux (though you could on chromebooks too)!
Otherwise, that's only until 2025, when Windows 10 support stops. Considering microsoft decided that throwing away tens of millions of devices is worth it in the name of security (while touting how green Windows 11 is, lol).
Now this is by no means unique to Chromebooks, but my recent experience may explain why the repair pipeline may be clogged a bit.
I have a brand-new Chromebook which is still within the vendor return period.
I was having trouble with HDMI/sleep mode, so I contacted Google One Support. They don't really do much ChromeOS support, so after misdirecting me a couple times, they referred me to the manufacturer.
So I contacted the manufacturer, and with a little troubleshooting (and a bizarre keypress combo that the support rep would not explain to me, he said "just press it and it will resolve glitches") they determined that it must be a hardware issue and prompted me to begin the RMA process.
Now I was offended, because they didn't actually know what the issue was, they had just exhausted a few very simple troubleshooting steps with my cooperation, and they were out of ideas, so it must be defective hardware for RMA!
I have also run into similar support issues with my phone, where the first troubleshooting step is to factory reset. No effort at identifying the cause, just nuke the thing from orbit. (In that case, it was a very recent system update to blame, and of course there is no way to roll back system updates on non-rooted Android phones.)
But I digress. If I had sent my Chromebook back to the factory, they would've decided there is no hardware failure (I can do diagnostics just as well as they can) and it would go back on the shelf or back to me with no modifications. And then I would have lost time with my computer, the repair place would've wasted time with diagnostics, and my HDMI/sleep issue would still not be resolved.
I am contacting Support for issues that are not showstoppers. They are not preventing me from starting the computer or getting work done. It was just an annoyance that the computer stays awake. I found a workaround already. Just try not to do these silly RMAs, OK?
I have two Chromebooks, both over 8 years old. The eldest, an ASUS, I gave to my dad and he uses it everyday. Aside from the odd security issue (he'll install any extension he's told to) it works just as well as it when it was new.
The other, a Toshiba, I've dragged around the world with me, has had one repair, a battery replacement, and, again, works fine.
Chromebooks are cheap but reliable devices that ought not to, in all honesty, last as long as they do.
I've had two ThinkPads in the same time, one was stolen and the other I use daily without issue. I buy reconditioned so the cost scale is comparable, as is the utility and reliability.
I think this illustrate pretty well the gap between how adults use their devices and see as "normal" use, and what the same devices go through in the hand of kids using them day in day out and shuffling them around like they do for their books.
My kid also destroyed the plastic around the hinge of an HP chromebook, and there was no way to find replacements part anywhere, locally, Amazon or AliExpress.
That's where it really hurts that there are so many variations and models of chromebooks, as even the most popular ones will be a small fraction of the market and third-party support is just non existent.
So you have a data point of 2 Chromebooks versus the school I.T. admins in the article that manage thousands, and you think your sample size wins?
How about the pointless bezel changes illustrated in the article? Drop your Chromebooks on the floor to crack the bezel, try to replace them, and get back to us for further data in your sample.
Obviously, I'm not a school admin but I would wager replacing a fleet of cheap Chromebooks with Macbooks (or any big brand Windows machines) would not work out cheaper, or less burdensome, or anywhere close.
FTIW iPad in school seem to survive better. There's a lot more limitations (screen size in particular, and keyboards being an accessory), but looking at the number of school working with fleets of them, from a sheer price/durability ratio they're probably doing well.
This is a deeply stupid paper that isn’t supported by the sources it cites. According to the source data, the only Chromebook with a firm number for greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing is the Pixelbook, and according to the same data it has the least embodied carbon of any laptop in their database. Other laptops in their list have as much as five times as much embodied carbon.
> having to replace an entire Chromebook keyboard because a single key doesn't work.
Stopped reading there.
I'm typing on a Lenovo Thinkpad L430; it has a couple of defective keys - they're arrow keys, the keys I use most often, because I like to scroll using the keyboard.
I bought replaccement keys online, and had to buy them from Poland (Lenovo don't sell them). You have to go through a rigmarole to select your model, and then you have to select the key you want, and then eyeball the key and compare it to closeups on the order form.
Two weeks later they arrived; they look OK, but they don't fit. They're too big. You can't tell just by looking, but they're a fraction of a millimetre bigger than the hole they're supposed to fit in.
I gave up, and replaced the Thinkpad (a replacement keyboard would have cost as much as the Dell Inspiron I bought second-hand).
And Google's policy is 8 years. The 4 year number is apparently an average for devices currently in the field, which... I mean, if the number of devices is roughly stable, then the average device is indeed halfway through its life.
(None of this is a defense of either; as I type this on a 12-year-old machine running a fully up-to-date Linux install, I have opinions on lifespans, I just want to compare, er, Apples to apples.)
Sort of, but Apple doesn't fix all known security issues on old OSes. So while it's true that you receive security updates, it's not true that it's particularly secure.
I agree. My 2009 Thinkpad still gets security patches, it would be a shame for premium devices to lose first-party support so soon. Goes to show the importance of an unlocked bootloader, I guess.
The T420 battery is literally just a bunch of off-the-shelf hobby cells run in serial. There's no reason to sell replacements, unless the little plastic enclosure holding it all together breaks.
I foolishly purchased my parents a "reconditioned" Google Chromebook from Lenovo.
The device was covered in black plastic sheets to conceal scratches and markings on the casing. When we activated the device, it was out of support.
I gave them a fresh HP Chromebook to replace it.
Avoid "reconditioned" Chromebooks.