I agree, but at the same time, this is an extension from 8 to 10 years. While this will surely buy time for many schools to upgrade, we can all be prepared for a re-hash of this kerfuffle in 2 years.
What laptops are we seriously expecting to last more than 10 years? I wouldn't expect that from a MacBook Pro or a Thinkpad, let alone a $300 Chromebook.
My father had been using a laptop he got in 2011 (I5-2410m) until a few months ago when I bought him a mini PC with an Intel N95, he didn't even want to switch because for the most part everything worked pretty well and why wouldn't it? The i5-2410m is faster than the Celeron N4020, which is commonly found in many ChromeBooks and budget laptops today, and the i5-2410m wasn't even the best mobile processor back then. Many cheap laptops today are also limited to a soldered-on 4GB of RAM, but most older laptops can be upgraded to 8GB.
I have several other laptops from 2011 which are even weaker (One with I5-560M (upgraded from 380M for 6$) and other with I3-2310M) and they are also mostly fine for web browsing and office, and capable of playing 1080p YouTube video even without hardware acceleration (they don't have VP9 decoding),with H264ify CPU usage drops to 30-40 percents.
With progress in semiconductors slowing down i would expect laptops to last even longer, but with manufactures soldering down RAM and sometimes even SSD maybe that won't be the case. Cause if i wouldn't be able to replaces HHD with SSD and upgrade RAM on these old laptops they would be garbage long time ago.
2008 ThinkPad t400 user here, running Ubuntu. Most business class notebooks are incredibly durable and the market offers replacement parts for 10 of 15 year old devices. A t400 battery is less than 25€ on Amazon and there are dozens of vendors.
My experience is different. My experience is that the failures are pretty random.
If you expect to lose 20% of laptops each year, after a decade, about 10% of laptops will still work after a decade. It's more if you are willing to work around issues (e.g. epoxy a crack or replace a part).
It's crappy if you need to toss otherwise good computers purely due to a software issue.
My opinion about 10 years ago (most likely affected by inflation now) was that a laptop costs roughly $100/year. When I had an inexpensive $300 laptop, it lasted about 3 years. In that time I opened the case multiple times to fix problems, usually involving overheating. Towards the end the laptop was unusably slow and unable to play full-screen video. When I bought a $1000 laptop, it so far has lasted 8 years and counting. I opened it once to upgrade the memory, and once again to simply tighten screws to reduce the chassis flex that had gotten worse over time.
Failures are random and infrequent if you start with good hardware. Sadly, in my experience a lot of cheap laptops do not come with reliable hardware.
It's less about price than about grades of laptop.
For example, if you buy Lenovo, the Idea* laptops will be junk laptops, while Think* will be pretty good quality. There are sub-grades within both. With Dell, there are usually several series with names changing periodically. In the Latitude series, the first number corresponded to quality when I last bought. 3xxx is junk. 5xxx is decent. 7xxx is good. There are similar divisions in their consumer lines.
It's possible to find very good reliable laptops if you're willing to live with last years' model, and especially with off-lease premium laptops. Corporate environments will often lease a thousand premium laptops for three years, not stress them very hard, and then they're sold for a song as there's a corporate-wide refresh.
You wouldn't? I have an X230 and it still works fine/is perfectly usable, and that's over 10 years old at this point. Why would you not expect a laptop to last more than 10 years?
If the hardware is still working, and the battery works enough to run off AC, even a 10 year old machine is still usable for a lot of stuff.
I got an Acer Chromebook C720 in 2013ish, and the dual-core Celeron 2955U (Haswell) with 4GB of RAM is still ok. The touchpad stopped working in mine, and I dunno how bad the battery is, and I installed FreeBSD for fun after ChromeOS stopped updating, but I bet it'd run ChromeOS Flex no problem. It doesn't have the virtualization extension needed to run Android apps (not part of ChromeOS Flex anyway), but I don't think there's anything else missing really.
I'll probably install ChromeOS Flex on my Lenovo ThinkPad 13 Chromebook after I let the final official OS update simmer a bit more (it's a pain to get to the firmware write protect screw), it's a much nicer case and a little bit newer processor, but otherwise pretty close to the Acer one; and the touch pad still works. OTOH, I don't think I can change out the storage and as I mentioned the write protect screw is hard to access.
Any Apple laptop has a good chance? My 2011 MacBook Air still works fine (as does the 2013) - the main problem is software support. You’re not playing games on that but it’s fine for email / web / video chat / office docs and light coding. Each of the earlier ones I had was replaced for performance reasons, not failure other than hard drives back when spinning metal was the norm.
Apple has been top of the industry in terms of length of OS/software support for their devices.
My iPhone 8 is still supported by the current iOS (no longer by 17, womp womp.) It's nearly seven years old, is still on its first battery with about 79% capacity left and it hasn't gone into brownout-prevention mode yet. I'm figuring that with the new iOS release it probably won't be supported, but who knows.
A few whiz-bang features aren't supported; fancy but kinda useless webcam stuff, and newer iPhones can do more extensive object recognition in photos like bugs and plants that I think my phone won't do.
I'm not missing much aside from better cellular band support, which is kind of a wash because my phone has a qualcomm modem and Apple's switch to intel modems didn't go well.
Even the newer cameras aren't tempting because a generation or two after the 8 and X, they all became inflicted with Apple's horrifically bad "AI" image processing that makes everything look like a watercolor painting.
The average lifespan of a desktop is five years, and for a laptop, 3-5. All of you bitching about how computers older than ten years old not being supported is some massive injustice are completely divorced from reality in the marketplace.
Apple provides security updates for the prior two releases, which means that damn near any Mac made in the last ten years, even without Opencore Legacy, is still receiving security updates.
My 2013 Macbook Pro will run the current MacOS release with Opencore Legacy. That's a now-ten-year-old computer running the current OS release.
Anyone who uses their computer for a significant period of time, and especially to make money, who does not upgrade more quickly than every ten years, isn't very smart. It doesn't take long, waiting for your computer every day, before it's costing you more in lost productivity than it would be to replace it with something newer, especially if you buy used.
Claiming that a ten year old laptop, Apple or otherwise, is "perfectly usable" is a joke by people who clearly haven't spent any appreciable time using current hardware, which is by every single measure enormously better.
> Apple has been top of the industry in terms of length of OS/software support for their devices.
For phones and tablets, sure. For desktops/laptops, Linux outdoes them handily. My mid-2012 MacBook Pro can run Catalina at the latest, which has been outdated for several years and unsupported since last year. But I can still install a current Linux distro on a machine of that era just fine.
This doesn’t absolve Apple of their lack of support for older Macs, but if you want to keep using that MacBook on a more modern MacOS, take a look at Open Core Legacy Patcher. Have Monterey on my 2012 Mac mini and it’s working great.
Oh Lord. There are lots of early teens/late oughts laptops out there being used today. Non-power-user laptop specs haven't really changed that much since then (4G of ram and 500G of storage) and normal people don't actually care about their processor or graphics card.
I was shift lead for a SIEM team when lockdown started and the number of 2009-2011 era machines that got pulled out of a closet and brought online when remote work started was staggering.
Software should not be a limiting factor in the lifespan of a laptop. If the hardware breaks and you toss it, I think that's much more acceptable than tossing it when the hardware still works but the software is out of date.
```
The company currently guarantees eight years of automatic updates to Chromebooks. That period, however, begins at the time when the company certifies a Chromebook, not when it’s actually in the owner’s hands. Because of the time it takes schools and businesses to purchase, receive, set up, and deploy new fleets of computers, they commonly end up getting four to five years of use out of them in practice.
```
so this is really about ensuring that the laptops actually get 5 years of use before needing to be replaced.
My MacBook Pro 2015 still trundles along just fine, and while that isn’t exactly 10 years it’s getting there. I did replace it with an M1 air for my personal use but my wife is still quite happy with it. The only thing that has needed replacement despite its hefty usage has been the power cable which fell apart at one point. Maybe it had seen too much sun? Not sure exactly, but the plastic sure disintegrated.
I’m not sure I’ll ever really need to replace my M1. I could technically still work on the pro, and I mostly got the M1 because of hype, but I really don’t see what is going to increase my systems requirements in the next 20 years to be beyond what the m1 is currently doing. Maybe if I start doing more compiling on it instead of in the cloud? But I really think we’re at the point where it’ll physically break before the spec become obsolete, or alternatively, that it’ll stop getting updates from Apple. At which point I guess it can just live on with Linux.
I run a small convention that just needs some easy to setup web kiosks to use for checkin. We bought a lot of 30 surplus Chromebooks at $15 each a few years ago, but we're throwing them out because of lack of support.
I am using a 12 year old Thinkpad as a secondary device. I don't see why it won't last me another 10. It runs a responsive and quite good looking modern Linux desktop environment from a HDD and I am not even using 40% of the RAM I have on it. I am obviously not encoding 4K video, running AI or AAA games on it, but for most things that people do on computers, it's perfectly fine.
This wasn't the case in 20-25 years ago when stuff would outdate real fast. 90% of people don't really need new computers.
As I said, the previous window was 8 years. Presumably schools are able to get end up with enough 8 year EOL laptops to have caused a storm about it. If they were manage cause that miracle, then they can probably manage to get enough of them to 10 years as well.
(And yes, I know what the real answer is - they bought bargain bin laptops like 4-6 years after RTM, so they only have like 2-4 years of actual wear and tear on them. Given their carelessness the first time, I wouldn't rule out a repeat in 2 years).
I bought an eeepc netbook in 2008. It was my main computer until 2012, spent several years sitting on a shelf, and now is my daughter's. It's still doing fine, as are the two other eeepcs people in my family bought around the same time.
It's not useful for very much, since it's way underpowered for most things you might want to do today, but it still works for typing and basic networking.
I still have functioning Thinkpads from 2011. They run well with SATA SSDs and minimal Linux distros, and they're handy in the garage or on a workbench where you might not your expensive devices lying around but need to reference technical data.
My personal laptop is a Thinkpad x250 from 2015. That is "only" 8 years old at this point, but I have every intention of continuing to use it for the foreseeable future.
