I know plenty of people who use Apple products such as iPhones and Macs and have to stop using them and throw them into landfill basically because there are no further security updates, although the device works fine and is fast enough for their needs.
Shortening security updates absolutely has an environmental impact.
This. I have an old 2012 Intel Retina Macbook Pro which is already several MacOS versions behind and I’m unable to update it through normal means any longer. It works fine and it still has the best looking screen of any laptop I ever owned.
I keep it at my parents’ house and I maybe use it 3/4 times per year, but it’s enough for my needs when I’m visiting and it feels wasteful to throw it away or store it for good. I fully understand that it is a 14yo machine and it is unreasonable for a company to support old hardware indefinitely, but still, it does feel like a waste.
>it is unreasonable for a company to support old hardware indefinitely
No it absolutely is not, and especially not for a company like Apple. A bunch of hippies make Linux drivers for museum grade hardware. The only reason Apple does this is to sell you new crap that looks and works the same as the old crap.
In the 90's and 00's a 10 year old computer was literally unusable. Today it's different, despite everything that web devs do to ruin it. My home file server is using 2011 hardware (except hdds).
I still don't get the point of Chromebooks. You need the exact same hardware as a real laptop, you don't get to save on anything, in fact it's worse, since browsers are usually heavier than real apps.
But you get less functionality, and have to hack into it even if you can to make it your own.
They're even worse for browsing, as you can only install addons and adblockers allowed by Google, which are deliberately gimped.
At least we get to enjoy freedom on our PCs - the smartphone-ification of computers is a worrying trend (this applies to games consoles too).
Yeah pretty much this. Google had a pretty successful effort to sell these devices as part of a managed solution: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/technology/google-education-chromebooks-schools.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/technology/google-educati...
Im guessing it was pretty easy for teachers (who they reached out to bypassing school procurement officers) or IT to manage.
Honestly, I used use a cheap chromebook throughout college since it was a fantastic linux device. Cheap (bought secondhand), Very little compute power, but fantastic keyboard, battery life, durable, light, and it ran coreboot. Super easy to unlock too for the early devices. You just had to remove the read protect screw. Obviously thats very niche though
Did you ever use GalliumOS? I remember catching a sale on an Acer Chromebook and then flashing that Ubuntu based distro onto. Uses that laptop for 5ish years before I turned it into a home server.
> I still don't get the point of Chromebooks. You need the exact same hardware as a real laptop, you don't get to save on anything, in fact it's worse, since browsers are usually heavier than real apps.
If by "Save on anything" you mean saving files, you are completely wrong.
There is a filesystem that you can save any data to. If you use the Linux VM you can run nearly any typical Linux software (including any of the in vogue coding agents). You can even run llama.cpp or ollama with GPU acceleration, though you might be constrained by the laptop level GPU and Memory constraints.
There are completely offline apps and tools available (via Android, Linux, and even offline PWAs).
You can even write your own apps and run them only locally on the any of the above 3 runtimes.
Of course, I wouldn't do these on a school-specced Chromebook that costs $200, but $700 Chromebook would easily suffice.
If you mean "Save money", then that's wrong too. ChromeOS is by default more lightweight than traditional Desktop OS's because of the relative lack of legacy cruft and the managed runtime. Even the Linux distro it includes is very stripped down by default (although you can bog it down by running too much stuff like any computer)
The only thing you can't do is run Windows or Mac specific software, but if you need that, ChromeOS was never a consideration anyways.
> Of course, I wouldn't do these on a school-specced Chromebook that costs $200, but $700 Chromebook would easily suffice.
I have used linux VMs on a an old $200 Chromebook (with a $50 Costco discount) and it's perfectly fine, Linux can go a long way with only 4GB RAM/32GB eMMC. It doesn't receive updates anymore, so I use the latest Firefox from Devian repos to browse the Internet instead of the stale Chrome that has many open CVEs
> ChromeOS is by default more lightweight than traditional Desktop OS
Maybe? The shipping ChromeOS on the Lenovo ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook (R7 3700C/16GB RAM/NVMe disk) is a dog. The system is nearly unusable. Can't even play YouTube videos properly, lags out with a few tabs, and maxes out the fan and practically freezes once you start trying to run serious Linux applications under Crostini. However, once blasted with MrChromebox firmware, and loaded with openSUSE, it runs very adequately. In fact, I'm posting this from inside Firefox with 17 tabs open, plus two instances of Okular and a kernel build running in the background, with no issue.
My wife and my 9yo have Chromebooks. Their needs are met. I (mostly) don't have to worry about data hygiene.
I'm sure my kid will want a "real" computer at some point, but by then he will hopefully have enough maturity to keep it secure. My wife couldn't care less.
> I still don't get the point of Chromebooks. You need the exact same hardware as a real laptop, you don't get to save on anything,
In a time when buttons are too expensive, avoiding having a windows key is a valuable savings :P
I've purchased a few chromebooks over time, and probably need to get one more for my mother-in-law. For her, the limitations of ChromeOS are a feature --- it's much harder for her to screw it up when she's on a call with fake support than with windows and she hadn't run anything other than a browser on her windows computer anyway.
Certainly the core hardware is basically the same, but fluffy optional hardware tends to be left off or lower cost for Chromebooks. Many manufacturers offer laptops without an OS, but you usually miss out on pricing promotions so you're paying for Windows even if you don't want it. Chromebooks get pricing promotions and firesales, so careful shopping gets you pretty inexpensive computers that are good enough to do what they need to do.
I don't like the forced expiration, and it's especially brutal when you purchase a new device late in its model life ... but I do try to purchase models that can use 3rd party bios replacement scripts so you can use them for other stuff when the OS is too far expired. Kind of derpy to have to bios replace to run ChromeOS flex to keep doing what you were doing, but such is life. Sometimes the device doesn't live that long, and that's fine too. Some of the chrombooks are cheaper simply because they have a very tiny SSD, and few of them are user replaceable, which makes prospects for running Windows later in life pretty bleak, but Windows is pretty bleak these days anyway. :P
I get your point, but in my experience, predatory ads are the most dangerous things elderly need to watch out for.
It's absolutely appalling just how many ads show up on the most boring and mainstream sites, and just how many of them are just straight up fraud or scams. I think ad blocking is a fundamental internet safety issue, if you want to hand a laptop to an older relative, and ChromeOS doesn't do anything against scam subscriptions.
> I still don't get the point of Chromebooks
Use case scenario that it fills perfectly for me: I'll spend a lot of evenings on my back porch streaming local sports or Youtube.
The short math on my last refurbished Chromebook would have been cents per hour of use I got out of it.
Battery life: Granted I'm using the screen at it's lowest possible (stock) brightness in my scenario, but I get at the very least 6 hours per charge on a 17" display.
If something catastrophic were to happen to it I'm more than happy to replace a ~$100 piece of hardware that's serving one dedicated function for me, and there's 0 data of consequence that I'd be losing. And it's sustained light amounts of rain with no side effects.
I've used and defended ChromeOS for power-users for a while now, though I'm rather less interested in it after the last year or two, and especially with this "Googlebook" push.
The good of it is, you get a state-of-the-art browser, constantly auto-updated against any security vulnerabilities and locked down against any type of hacking or malware, with first-class support for audio, video, bluetooth, and things like that that have tended to be hit-or-miss with Desktop Linux on bare metal. Contrary to lots of tech community noise, UBlock Lite continues to work fine and is perfectly adequate for blocking ads. You can indeed save local files and use them fine.
You also get a full Linux OS with command-line and desktop apps working fine. Pretty much everything you could want to do Linux-y works. Android apps work locally too, if that's helpful to you. So it seems, or seemed, like the best of both worlds to me.
Alas, nowadays, Google seems rather less interested in it, and Googlebooks sound much more limited to me. Meanwhile, Apple also discourages, though has not blocked (yet?) installing apps outside their App Store, and wants you to keep all your data and messaging in the Apple ecosystem. Microsoft is trying to do the same regarding apps, and apparently, at least some configurations of Windows 11 will force you to log in to a OneDrive account and then upload your files to it, delete them locally (!), and try to bill you to access them if they take up more than a gig or something.
I already decided months ago anyways that my next laptop is going to be a Framework running native desktop Linux, since it's much easier to troubleshoot in the LLM era, and it seems like every other desktop OS just keeps getting worse.
When they were dirt cheap they were excellent for education. Most edu-tech apps are webapps and endpoint management on these was (presumably) a breeze if you had G-Suite/Workspace, a perfect combination for budget-constrained schools. Same with state governments.
I also have two X220 machines, and I use them more than the X200 now. They still work perfectly, while my X200 is getting flakey. (Although with its SSD and 8GB of RAM, it runs Alpine very well indeed and could be a daily driver.)
The X220 has a slightly shallowed screen; that's a weakness. But mine are 100% usable: between them, I run Haiku, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Ubuntu, and Pop OS, and all of them go like stink and are daily-drivable on this 2011 hardware.
Good Speakers,
Oled Screen
Good Keyboard,
32GB ram+
That's my 4 minimum requirements for a laptop nowadays. As I don't just work on my laptops, but also listen to music/podcasts and watch video content.
If that is good enough, I will put up with a bad screen.
Good speakers is very nice to have, I admit, but I do not do podcasts or videos. I do listen to the radio a lot, however.
I do not own a single laptop with 32GB RAM. That I don't care about. My desktop does, but the biggest laptops are 24GB, which was massively cheaper. Most are 16GB which I find enough for even quite intensive use.
I have an X230 which was upgraded with a quad-core CPU (i7-3612qe), 16gb RAM, SSD, and 1080p screen, and it makes a pretty decent around-the-house laptop. I'd rate it pretty highly; it's not quite as fast as my 6th gen X1 Carbon but the X1 is starting to get quite flaky.
"Best build quality" is the most important part. If you never got to handle one you are missing out. Glass and Solid milled aluminum. Silicone wrist pads and grip. 4:3 screen ratio. high quality keyboard. Rock solid 360 screen hinge.
Hardware is essentially a high end cellphone from 2016, which isn't a powerhouse but still does everything I would ask of a chromebook in 2026. Batteries are all generally going well.
Repair-ability is a challenge, but I want to work on that. You can mod it to run windows or linux. Stock it runs chromeos, linux subsystem, and android apps. It has a "feature" where if you keep in developer mode it auto-wipes itself if anybody else tries to boot it (hitting anything but the un-indicated ctrl-d at the boot screen initiates powerwash). Great for international travel.
It isn't a good choice for "power" but dominates every other aspect of "being a good laptop". It was too expensive for the chromebook market back then, but now you can pick them up for $200 and hand them to your parents and stop getting asked to fix their computer.
I wouldn't even say 8 years is "old" for a computer anymore, right around Intel's Haswell generation we crossed a threshold of cores and performance and computers became Good Enough. You can see it with Android and iOS tablets too they last a very long time, and of course Apple Silicon leaves no doubt.
I have a 12 year old Acer C720 that while obviously doesn't run chromeos anymore, it's still useful as a super durable 12'' linux machine.(thankfully it's intel based)
It road around in a backpack while cycling around campus, survived multiple bike spills, knocked off tables half a dozen times.
Really sad we can't get something like this anymore.
I would be stunned to find that less-affluent districts weren't acquiring hand-me-down Chromebooks or stretching their fleet's lifespan for as long as they could manage. Would love to believe that things have gotten better since the, "History books still mention the USSR," (true) urban legends of my Millennial youth, but I somehow doubt it.
I live in probably one of the poorest districts in my state. Google basically gives these things away for free for the management contract on top of the gsuite contracts the districts get.
bryanlarsen · · focus · HN ↗
While there won't be many there definitely will be some; I know of an ~8 year old Chromebook currently in active use.
broodbucket · · focus · HN ↗
bryanlarsen · · focus · HN ↗
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adrianmsmith · · focus · HN ↗
I know plenty of people who use Apple products such as iPhones and Macs and have to stop using them and throw them into landfill basically because there are no further security updates, although the device works fine and is fast enough for their needs.
Shortening security updates absolutely has an environmental impact.
Kurtz79 · · focus · HN ↗
I keep it at my parents’ house and I maybe use it 3/4 times per year, but it’s enough for my needs when I’m visiting and it feels wasteful to throw it away or store it for good. I fully understand that it is a 14yo machine and it is unreasonable for a company to support old hardware indefinitely, but still, it does feel like a waste.
encom · · focus · HN ↗
No it absolutely is not, and especially not for a company like Apple. A bunch of hippies make Linux drivers for museum grade hardware. The only reason Apple does this is to sell you new crap that looks and works the same as the old crap.
In the 90's and 00's a 10 year old computer was literally unusable. Today it's different, despite everything that web devs do to ruin it. My home file server is using 2011 hardware (except hdds).
Don't believe their lies.
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lightedman · · focus · HN ↗
shiandow · · focus · HN ↗
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torginus · · focus · HN ↗
But you get less functionality, and have to hack into it even if you can to make it your own.
They're even worse for browsing, as you can only install addons and adblockers allowed by Google, which are deliberately gimped.
At least we get to enjoy freedom on our PCs - the smartphone-ification of computers is a worrying trend (this applies to games consoles too).
KetoManx64 · · focus · HN ↗
For schools it can be locked down with group policies, for boomers it's just a machine to use a web browser
rrego · · focus · HN ↗
Honestly, I used use a cheap chromebook throughout college since it was a fantastic linux device. Cheap (bought secondhand), Very little compute power, but fantastic keyboard, battery life, durable, light, and it ran coreboot. Super easy to unlock too for the early devices. You just had to remove the read protect screw. Obviously thats very niche though
KetoManx64 · · focus · HN ↗
danans · · focus · HN ↗
If by "Save on anything" you mean saving files, you are completely wrong.
There is a filesystem that you can save any data to. If you use the Linux VM you can run nearly any typical Linux software (including any of the in vogue coding agents). You can even run llama.cpp or ollama with GPU acceleration, though you might be constrained by the laptop level GPU and Memory constraints.
There are completely offline apps and tools available (via Android, Linux, and even offline PWAs).
You can even write your own apps and run them only locally on the any of the above 3 runtimes.
Of course, I wouldn't do these on a school-specced Chromebook that costs $200, but $700 Chromebook would easily suffice.
If you mean "Save money", then that's wrong too. ChromeOS is by default more lightweight than traditional Desktop OS's because of the relative lack of legacy cruft and the managed runtime. Even the Linux distro it includes is very stripped down by default (although you can bog it down by running too much stuff like any computer)
The only thing you can't do is run Windows or Mac specific software, but if you need that, ChromeOS was never a consideration anyways.
circuit10 · · focus · HN ↗
overfeed · · focus · HN ↗
I have used linux VMs on a an old $200 Chromebook (with a $50 Costco discount) and it's perfectly fine, Linux can go a long way with only 4GB RAM/32GB eMMC. It doesn't receive updates anymore, so I use the latest Firefox from Devian repos to browse the Internet instead of the stale Chrome that has many open CVEs
theodric · · focus · HN ↗
Maybe? The shipping ChromeOS on the Lenovo ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook (R7 3700C/16GB RAM/NVMe disk) is a dog. The system is nearly unusable. Can't even play YouTube videos properly, lags out with a few tabs, and maxes out the fan and practically freezes once you start trying to run serious Linux applications under Crostini. However, once blasted with MrChromebox firmware, and loaded with openSUSE, it runs very adequately. In fact, I'm posting this from inside Firefox with 17 tabs open, plus two instances of Okular and a kernel build running in the background, with no issue.
YMMV, I guess.
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
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stickfigure · · focus · HN ↗
I'm sure my kid will want a "real" computer at some point, but by then he will hopefully have enough maturity to keep it secure. My wife couldn't care less.
toast0 · · focus · HN ↗
In a time when buttons are too expensive, avoiding having a windows key is a valuable savings :P
I've purchased a few chromebooks over time, and probably need to get one more for my mother-in-law. For her, the limitations of ChromeOS are a feature --- it's much harder for her to screw it up when she's on a call with fake support than with windows and she hadn't run anything other than a browser on her windows computer anyway.
Certainly the core hardware is basically the same, but fluffy optional hardware tends to be left off or lower cost for Chromebooks. Many manufacturers offer laptops without an OS, but you usually miss out on pricing promotions so you're paying for Windows even if you don't want it. Chromebooks get pricing promotions and firesales, so careful shopping gets you pretty inexpensive computers that are good enough to do what they need to do.
I don't like the forced expiration, and it's especially brutal when you purchase a new device late in its model life ... but I do try to purchase models that can use 3rd party bios replacement scripts so you can use them for other stuff when the OS is too far expired. Kind of derpy to have to bios replace to run ChromeOS flex to keep doing what you were doing, but such is life. Sometimes the device doesn't live that long, and that's fine too. Some of the chrombooks are cheaper simply because they have a very tiny SSD, and few of them are user replaceable, which makes prospects for running Windows later in life pretty bleak, but Windows is pretty bleak these days anyway. :P
torginus · · focus · HN ↗
It's absolutely appalling just how many ads show up on the most boring and mainstream sites, and just how many of them are just straight up fraud or scams. I think ad blocking is a fundamental internet safety issue, if you want to hand a laptop to an older relative, and ChromeOS doesn't do anything against scam subscriptions.
anodyne33 · · focus · HN ↗
Use case scenario that it fills perfectly for me: I'll spend a lot of evenings on my back porch streaming local sports or Youtube.
The short math on my last refurbished Chromebook would have been cents per hour of use I got out of it.
Battery life: Granted I'm using the screen at it's lowest possible (stock) brightness in my scenario, but I get at the very least 6 hours per charge on a 17" display.
If something catastrophic were to happen to it I'm more than happy to replace a ~$100 piece of hardware that's serving one dedicated function for me, and there's 0 data of consequence that I'd be losing. And it's sustained light amounts of rain with no side effects.
wmf · · focus · HN ↗
Ferret7446 · · focus · HN ↗
ufmace · · focus · HN ↗
The good of it is, you get a state-of-the-art browser, constantly auto-updated against any security vulnerabilities and locked down against any type of hacking or malware, with first-class support for audio, video, bluetooth, and things like that that have tended to be hit-or-miss with Desktop Linux on bare metal. Contrary to lots of tech community noise, UBlock Lite continues to work fine and is perfectly adequate for blocking ads. You can indeed save local files and use them fine.
You also get a full Linux OS with command-line and desktop apps working fine. Pretty much everything you could want to do Linux-y works. Android apps work locally too, if that's helpful to you. So it seems, or seemed, like the best of both worlds to me.
Alas, nowadays, Google seems rather less interested in it, and Googlebooks sound much more limited to me. Meanwhile, Apple also discourages, though has not blocked (yet?) installing apps outside their App Store, and wants you to keep all your data and messaging in the Apple ecosystem. Microsoft is trying to do the same regarding apps, and apparently, at least some configurations of Windows 11 will force you to log in to a OneDrive account and then upload your files to it, delete them locally (!), and try to bill you to access them if they take up more than a gig or something.
I already decided months ago anyways that my next laptop is going to be a Framework running native desktop Linux, since it's much easier to troubleshoot in the LLM era, and it seems like every other desktop OS just keeps getting worse.
nunez · · focus · HN ↗
blamestross · · focus · HN ↗
TheqO · · focus · HN ↗
lproven · · focus · HN ↗
I know of two "best laptops ever made":
Drew DeVault says it's the X200:
<a href="https://drewdevault.com/blog/Fucking-laptops/" rel="nofollow">https://drewdevault.com/blog/Fucking-laptops/
« The best laptop ever made is the ThinkPad X200, and I have two of them. »
He has a very strong case. I own one. It is certainly one of the best ever.
On the other hand, Brad Taunt says it is the X220:
<a href="https://btxx.org/posts/x220/" rel="nofollow">https://btxx.org/posts/x220/
« The X220 ThinkPad is the greatest laptop ever made and you’re wrong if you think otherwise. »
Ulaş Türkmen agrees:
<a href="https://okigiveup.net/blog/why-thinkpad-x220-is-the-best-laptop-ever-made/" rel="nofollow">https://okigiveup.net/blog/why-thinkpad-x220-is-the-best-lap...
I also have two X220 machines, and I use them more than the X200 now. They still work perfectly, while my X200 is getting flakey. (Although with its SSD and 8GB of RAM, it runs Alpine very well indeed and could be a daily driver.)
The X220 has a slightly shallowed screen; that's a weakness. But mine are 100% usable: between them, I run Haiku, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Ubuntu, and Pop OS, and all of them go like stink and are daily-drivable on this 2011 hardware.
TheqO · · focus · HN ↗
That's my 4 minimum requirements for a laptop nowadays. As I don't just work on my laptops, but also listen to music/podcasts and watch video content.
lproven · · focus · HN ↗
If that is good enough, I will put up with a bad screen.
Good speakers is very nice to have, I admit, but I do not do podcasts or videos. I do listen to the radio a lot, however.
I do not own a single laptop with 32GB RAM. That I don't care about. My desktop does, but the biggest laptops are 24GB, which was massively cheaper. Most are 16GB which I find enough for even quite intensive use.
maximilianburke · · focus · HN ↗
lproven · · focus · HN ↗
Life is too short for modding machines I want to be daily drivers, like fitting an X220 keyboard to it.
blamestross · · focus · HN ↗
Hardware is essentially a high end cellphone from 2016, which isn't a powerhouse but still does everything I would ask of a chromebook in 2026. Batteries are all generally going well.
Repair-ability is a challenge, but I want to work on that. You can mod it to run windows or linux. Stock it runs chromeos, linux subsystem, and android apps. It has a "feature" where if you keep in developer mode it auto-wipes itself if anybody else tries to boot it (hitting anything but the un-indicated ctrl-d at the boot screen initiates powerwash). Great for international travel.
It isn't a good choice for "power" but dominates every other aspect of "being a good laptop". It was too expensive for the chromebook market back then, but now you can pick them up for $200 and hand them to your parents and stop getting asked to fix their computer.
benoau · · focus · HN ↗
corvad · · focus · HN ↗
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MSFT_Edging · · focus · HN ↗
It road around in a backpack while cycling around campus, survived multiple bike spills, knocked off tables half a dozen times.
Really sad we can't get something like this anymore.
mobilio · · focus · HN ↗
Amazing device for it’s price!
underlipton · · focus · HN ↗
JoeBOFH · · focus · HN ↗
underlipton · · focus · HN ↗