So it's as low as 8 years instead of 10 for models purchased in the last 2 years (2034 being the cutoff), with those few devices being covered by a separate commitment to transfer them to GoogleOS by 2034.
Pretty lame detail to be enraged about, but it is Google and this is HN. This aligns with Apple's timeline for killing Intel MacBook support after releasing Apple Silicon (2029 being the last commitment).
Apple promises all customers 5 years of hardware support past the last day the model was available for sale, and at least two years of limited hardware support thereafter.
In the UK, for iPhone 15 and later, Apple promises at least 5 years of software updates from the time that model was first offered for sale.
I would assume similar schedule outside the UK as well, but afaik it is only explicitly promised in the UK, due to regulatory requirements there.
For enterprise customers, Apple guarantee a minimum period of software security updates for macOS, but the exact period is kept confidential in the specific agreements.
Like the UK iPhone commitment, I assume the enterprise macOS schedule apply to all customers, and Apple just avoids publicly publishing it, I would guess to avoid some legal-induced headaches (which I personally think is the worst excuse, but I digress).
Seems to be more reasonable than this title suggests?
Some comments:
"So they have introduced a major change and said any older Chromebooks bought going forward will only get 8. So its not a retrospective reduction for existing customers." (Edit: actually I think this comment is wrong, if you bought a Chromebook 1 year ago, you'd only get 9 years of ChromeOS updates)
"From my understanding of the article, it sounds like ChromeOS support is getting pared back for those devices, but the devices themselves should still be supported, albeit via a (planned but not yet in existence) migration path to GooglebookOS."
These devices are usually bought on contract, with lots of lock in.
In particular, there are lots of schools getting screwed over financially. Maybe they’ll switch vendors, or use the money for education. Chromebook spending has a strong negative correlation with educational performance.
As a parent, I am supposed to have control over my kids’ personal information, but the schools firehose all the most sensitive kids’ info they have to an unlawful marketing firm that I do not trust. How do I opt out?
Hey ChatGPT, set a reminder for 2036 to tell me whether Google was found not to secretly violate TOS of School Chromebooks and use the data harvested from them to create value for it's shareholders.
they do not. I don't work there anymore and don't have any particular goodwill towards the employer that laid me off last year but I can guarantee that any data related to the education sector is under extremely strict controls.
I really do not understand how anyone can give Google the benefit of the doubt in 2026. They literally make the law. They only adhere to the law when it makes financial sense.
Right but stuff like PRISM is the government getting data. In this scenario “the government shouldn’t trust Google with data because it might end up in the hands of the government” doesn’t really make a lot of sense.
Legally they cannot, no. And sure, they could violate contracts and break data protection laws. But they’d be trading an enormous hit on their reputation, who knows how many hundreds of millions in educational contracts for, what, some basic demographic data on kids? Data they’ll almost certainly be able to get via other means once the kid becomes an adult?
I don’t like Google’s involvement in education. I don’t like Google much at all. But we should still be able to examine this stuff rationally without devolving into conspiracy theories that don’t make logical sense.
Honestly reputation isn't the main concern if you're in leadership there, although it is absolutely a concern. The main concern is having to do another consent decree with either the EU or the US government. Those are a complete pain in the ass.
That isn't what the OP was alleging. Of course they store data -- encrypted both in transit and at rest, and you can even activate client side encryption (https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/security/about-...) -- but that doesn't mean they exfiltrate, use or share your data for their own purposes.
They don't, they never have, and they won't (unless there is a blatant, illegal policy violation and lapse of controls internally). This is very similar to the controls and policies in place governing FedRAMP contracts or the control of PCI/financial or HIPAA/healthcare data.
This absolutely happens, there's a set of teams whose job it is to make sure it happens every time a system is going to be handling customer data. It's not left to the engineers to remember to do so.
Tell me you've never worked at Google without telling me you've never worked at Google.
There are a lot of complaints you can legitimately levy, but "Google doesn't have enough of a compliance org to ensure eng behaves." is not one of them.
Yes, absolutely. Every microservice where I work is architecturally scrutinized by multiple groups over things like PCI, GDPR and SOX, with major features requiring review. And then third party auditors get to review stuff occasionally. PII is radioactive and PCI data is hard siloed.
If you work at a company that deals with education or HIPAA stuff, there's going to be even more of that.
Homeschool, vote for free school choice, vote for getting the subsidized funds to where you actually send your kids. Solves most problems related to bad school policies.
> vote for getting the subsidized funds to where you actually send your kids
…which is what happens today with public schools. Your case only makes sense if you’re sending your kid to private school and would like public funds to help pay for it.
School vouchers allow richer families to go to private school while preventing lower income folks from doing so, exacerbating problems with educational achievement.
School vouchers are the only fair way to do schooling. Rich people paying for more expensive things isn’t bad. They just shouldn’t be forced to pay for the more expensive thing that they use as well as the less expensive thing they don’t use
I'm happy to offer to one. However check with your insurance company as they will have to pay put a much high rate for services should your house burn. This case who subscribe yearly to fire protection get a much better deal than those who don't.
If you opt out and want your house to burn that is only fine so long as you ensure the fire doesn't spread, if there is signs it might spread out have to pay inflated rates for fire service to protect the other houses that you can't burn down with yours.
Surely that depends entirely on your definition of the word “fair”. Is it fair that a lower income child is deprived of an opportunity to improve their life through education because their parents can’t afford it?
Ultimately the debate here is “should richer people have to contribute back to society to help the lives of the poorer people”? Of course you can say no to that. But the majority of society doesn’t agree.
At least in America aren’t school taxes extremely local? I’m not sure what you are suggesting actually happens, or at least you are exaggerating quite a bit.
Poor people typically don’t live in the same neighborhoods as wealthy people in America. Wealthy neighborhood public schools tend to have lavish facilities from the tax base, so it’s more like “wealthy guy X doesn’t want to pay for the very fancy facilities he isn’t even using”, not “wealthy guy X doesn’t want to pay to send his poor neighbor’s kid to school at all”.
Where I live all the districts in the metro area pool the money and divide it so the poor student is worth just as much as the rich student in a different district. (Assuming you don't go to a private school)
There are still schools rated much worse than others.
“School choice” is just marketing language to disguise “funneling general tax dollars into private schools so wealthy people don’t have to pay for the privilege.”
Wealthy people don't want more students going to their children's schools. School choice is about funneling public funds to evangelical (aka extremist) Christian churches.
No. It's about pushing decisions out to the edges and empowering parents (and students) to help run the school system. To frame it this way is to deny the powerful evolution brought about by real choice.
Are you saying "the impact of Chromebooks, specifically, is unknown" or are you saying "the impact of Chromebooks is known to be better than the overall average" here?
Isn't it retrospective to all customers who purchased in the last 2 years? They're not saying a Chromebook bought yesterday gets 10 years but one bought tomorrow only gets 8. They're saying they all end in 2034. If you bought one yesterday expecting 10 years of updates, you got screwed.
It would be relatively straightforward to do automatically. Both OS's use a Linux kernel and Linux filesystems. Whether they will or should is a different question, but technically it's straightforward.
That's why this branding decision is a mess: Googlebooks are meant to be a good Gemini experience, and probably have some minimum requirements for local inference. The OS for these machines is all one probably very messy derivative of the same code base, where an android runtime is centrally important to having apps on that platform. But now the imperative is to center the AI experience, whether or not branding and product formulation can be made understandable.
Reasonable would have been to deprecate support in 10 years, not 8.
Saying "yeah, we promised you 10 years of support, but if you just bought yours the last two years of that will only be supported if you switch to a completely different OS. But happily some of our devices have a direct migration path (if that's not yours, deal with it). Better hope the features you need will be available in our new OS by then, because right now they are not" is a major rugpull and not reasonable at all
“Completely different OS” might not affect the user experience all that much, though, since these devices are for running Chrome and it will still run Chrome. (And be better at other things like running Android apps, presumably.)
We don’t have any details about what the upgrade path will look like and it probably hasn’t been implemented yet, so this is all speculative.
If they didn’t do an OS change, they could still evolve it a lot over 10 years. Chrome could evolve too. You’re trusting the vendor to not screw up your workflow either way.
The downside to the user experience, so to speak, is that the newer OS will be more powerful / featureful, which will require updating a lot of managed policies for places like schools or locked-down businesses. They'll have to evaluate whether they want to deal with that and continue on the new OS and commit to it in the future, continue with it for a very short time then start all over again on windows or something, or just give up the time they were promised.
Of course, I don't think any schools are getting 10 years out of a chromebook, but some businesses might be.
Not that Google has done anything to make it more obvious but ChromeOS, the OS on GoogleBooks, and an obscure Linux you can put on random old PCs, are all related in interesting ways if not derived from the same project.
The practical issue in this case appears to be that GoogleBooks branding is meant to indicate they are good at running Gemini and other Google AI technologies. Chromebook aren't.
I doubt the entity called Google is of one mind about any of this.
My pet theory with this move from Chromebooks to Googlebooks is simply that Chromebooks have a major stink on their entire brand reputation, especially in the younger generation that went through school with terrible cheap (and likely used/damaged) Chromebooks being given to them for schoolwork.
I think if you say "Chromebook" around most 20-something and unders, they have an instant negative association with the word.
Unless you are the most hardcore Google fan, I don't see why you want to spend $1k on a Googlebook instead of a Windows laptop or MacBook at the same price range.
I was a hardcore Google fan and that's what made me hate them. Trying to invest in their ecosystem is like being in an abusive relationship. They can't commit to anything, so any product you make part of your workflow will be inevitably ripped away from you with an assured promise that the new, blatantly worse thing replacing it is so much better.
All of their output is entirely dependent on internal product owners using Google products as stepping stones to ladder climb. Once they replaced a product, or did a giant 2.0 revamp, they move on and no one wants to maintain it.
Agree from a branding standpoint. Idk what a googlebook is or is going to be, but if it’s kneecapped the same way Chromebook, Android, and “iPad OS” are, it’s never going to be a real competitor.
And by this I mean being captive to App Store/Play Store, the weird “everything has to be inside Chrome” thing of Chromebook, the obtuse window-management contortions of iPad, etc. People expect to be able to install software of their choice on a real computer. I already have a smartphone. I don’t need a second giant one with a keyboard.
If they want to actually compete they should put their weight behind a real Linux distribution that works normally. Totally OK to add all the custom features they want, like running Android apps. But just don’t make it so weird.
(And no, developer-mode side loading doesn’t change any of that.)
> My pet theory with this move from Chromebooks to Googlebooks is simply that Chromebooks have a major stink on their entire brand reputation
I think you're right. Many of the students I've talked to have an immediate reaction of "slow, limited" when asked about a Chromebook. The early years of under-powered hardware and limited storage/memory really did them a disservice when it comes to brand
My kid had a school supplied Chromebook for 4 years that she was allowed to keep. She hated it, constantly abused it and was thrilled to stop using it. It's now my spare/mobile work device and I LOVE IT. It has a rock solid build, small enough to use in my lap, touchscreen, still has a great battery and being a Chromebook... it just works! Kids are kinda dumb (I'm only half joking) and I think even if they were given MacBooks she would have shit all over it just because it was associated with school.
I was in a Chromebook pilot program when I was at Google. They gave me a different model every month or three as long as I kept giving them feedback. The build quality and usability varied wildly. Some models were so good I forgot I wasn’t on a real laptop. Some were so slow and unusable even on basic sites. Unfortunately the latter tended to be the ones that were so cheap that they ended up in schools.
> ChromeOS devices will continue to receive regular updates and security patches through mid-2034. For qualifying devices purchased today whose 10-year support lifecycle extends beyond 2034, Google is committed to supporting your transition to Googlebook OS, with many devices offering direct migration paths.
In other words, support will be offered until 2034. if you're buying a new Chromebook today and intend to keep it for longer than 8 years, you're doing so at your own risk.
> Google promised 10 years of updates for all Chromebooks, and it’s now breaking that promise for anyone buying a Chromebook between now and whenever the last Chromebook rolls off the production line
So, they're changing the promise from now on, and not breaking it for past users. Doesn't sound like they're breaking their promise to me.
My 2015 Chromebook Pixel didn't even live that long.
First, it looked amazing - solid aluminum body, powerful i7 inside, 16G RAM, high-resolution touch-sensitive screen. And that amazing Google-styled LED strip that showed the charge when double-tapped.
Then the hardware started to fail. First, the shiny chrome letters saying "Chromebook" slid aside, revealing a glue-filled depression. I struggled to properly glue it back ever since. Then, the hinge mechanism seal failed, and a sticky substance started to leak from the back. Then the battery started to fail even though it was maybe 2 or 3 years old. And finally, the screen backlight started to fail, and bright spots started to appear from the edges to the point that it can no longer be used. Dead in 3 or 4 years.
For comparison, my also 2015 MacBook Pro 13 still works perfectly, except for the software - Apple also stopped updating macOS, and I'm considering just installing Linux on that otherwise fully functional hardware.
It should be illegal to force software obsolescence on otherwise functioning hardware, increasing the global e-waste footprint.
My Core i3 Pixelbook Go is still a peppy little web browser like it's always been. I'm going to replace the battery and see how the Linux install goes when the ChromeOS updates stop coming.
I also have a MBP from 2015 and have a recent OS install via OCLP. With only an i5 and 8GB it's slow to start, but once everything is going it's a reasonable UX if I stick to Safari.
I installed EndeavourOS on my 2015 MBP 13 and it's pretty great. Machine feels awesome. Had to have Codex patch a few small things (e.g. the fan thresholds, some power management stuff) and the speakers sound atrocious but it's super fast and extremely usable.
Replaced the battery with a $50 replacement one from Amazon myself, and I get like 5-6 hours of usage.
Googlebook is an absolutely awful name. Imagine being one of the people who worked on that. You collect your 200k paycheque, you go home to your family, you have to look your children in the eyes… knowing you called it a googlebook.
I know it’s satire but your comment made me think about the engineers working at Flock I’d bet most of them feel ashamed of it even in front of acquaintances.
The willful ignorance of the tech community is getting out of hand. This is the same thing as the "windows 10 is the last version of windows" discourse which stems from the absolutely abysmal state of tech journalism. You would think that by now that it would at least match financial journalism, but apparently we're fine settling for people who don't care about or understand what they are writing about.
This isn't an issue, the 10 years of support was promised for the hardware, not the software. They are fulfilling that promise by updating the devices to GooglebookOS.
Was “automatic“ a part of the promise? Now there’s some e.g. fixed income seniors sold on the inexpensive, hassle-free gear who have to deal with a lack of a “direct migration path“ in their later years?
Is Googlebook OS going to be "open source" like Chrome OS was (through Chromium)? Or is this also a forced transition from open -> closed? (that would make me far madder than simply forcing a migration).
I too would like to know this. I suspect there won't be an equivalent of ChromiumOS for Googlebook OS. Likely a combo of AOSP and proprietary closed source code.
It's a special version of Android that has a developer mode that unlocks a virtual (sandboxed) Linux environment. Because otherwise, no one would be able to use git (Android's filesystem abstraction is so slow for git, it's worse than NTFS).
Inside the virtual layer, you get real ext4/btrfs and real terminal applications will run at near-native speeds (supposedly) but their ability to interact with other applications (Android side) will be limited.
In short, it's not a real computer. Not a general-purpose one, anyway.
Google thinks that the selling point will be that enterprises can have their locked-down environment in the Android OS which allows remote wipe capabilities and heavily-sandboxed apps while it also allows developers the power to run whatever they want inside their little virtual Linux sandbox (e.g. VS Code). Sort of like WSL.
What they fail to understand is that enterprises will want just as much control over that sandboxed Linux environment as they have over the Android side of things. Making the entire purpose of the device moot.
Another idea behind the project is that it will allow Google to sell laptops that run processors that are traditionally used in smartphones without having to port the drivers and whatnot to general, open source Linux. Things like deep sleep states with rapid resume should "just work" because it's using Android which was what the vendor targeted when they made the chip.
The foundation of the entire device is hacks upon hacks in order to avoid doing the right thing (and possibly giving up market share to generic OEMs that might make their own ARM laptops).
The actual solution to all these issues is for mobile processor companies like Qualcomm to just be good Linux citizens.
> It's a special version of Android that has a developer mode that unlocks a virtual (sandboxed) Linux environment
Android for mobile (at least on Pixel phones) has this too.
The "special" bit is the desktop experience. New Pixels have a desktop mode if you plug them into a monitor but it's not as fleshed out and doesn't have their Gemini-ified cursor etc. At least not yet.
I think your notes re. ARM and Qualcomm hit the nail on the head though!
Is anyone surprised at this? Abandoning products in an untimely fashion is their specialty. I've never bought a hardware product from them for that reason, except for a 2nd gen Chromecast which was something whose longevity I didn't care too much about.
Statements a manufacturer makes about their device before purchase are usually treated as legally binding. Saying you provide 10 years of updates is just like saying your charger delivers 60W.
You don't need a contract for that, if the statement is untrue the product is now defective. And if done on purpose this is usually considered fraud
They’ve already got the necessary lawyers to negotiate the class action settlement and to send checks for a portion of the purchase price to every class member, and they calculated that this would still save them money vs. whatever the alternative was.
I'm sure it was just a pinky promise with a million lines of small print saying they can actually do whatever they want regardless of what they said.
Also, in 2034 things will likely be radically different in computing. A local llm will likely either make such considerations entirely obsolete because support will be easy, or all current tech will be taken away from consumers anyway and everything will be much tighter controlled and monitored.
This doesn’t seem like such a big deal but it’s just more evidence that Google’s word is trash. Just don’t rely on them for anything and you’ll be fine
I'm on the school board for our school, and they last a few years if we're lucky. There are some that survive up to maybe 7, but they accrete so much damage by then. While I think it would have been ideal for G to keep it 10 years, I think in practice it won't matter for many people. Most students are awfully hard on those things after all.
I work in e-waste recycling. I've seen hundreds, maybe thousands of Chromebooks come in from schools. They are five years old maximum, and most are in pretty bad shape.
Well this is up to the phone OEM's (Samsung, Sony, etc) not Google themselves. Google appears to be asserting more control over the software stack of these Googlebooks.
Are the people who made the promise even still at Google?
It reminds me of those sketchy companies on Amazon promising "lifetime guarantee" on their products when they know already they're gonna close shop and reopen on a completely different brand the very next year.
In practice, if there has been some kind internal restructuring, the infrastructure required to keep those previous promises probably isn't there anymore. Try contacting Google support, I guess.
Also, unless such promises were put on paper in some kind of contract AND without the ever present "We reserve the right to change the terms of this agreement partially or fully in the future" fine line, it was just some kind of wishful thinking by whatever manager was in charge of the Chromebooks project at the time.
Let's be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if the product EULA says somewhere "This device is licensed to you, not sold. You are granted a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, and personal license to use the device for your private, non-commercial use."
The whole point of corporations is that the assets (and liabilities) created by the people working on behalf of the corporation outlive the term of their employment.
They don't (or at least shouldn't) get to keep the assets without also honouring the liabilities.
Sorry, I thought it was obvious I was just pointing out that probably none of the previous management team (and consequently decisions) are still left. You can switch "people" with project plan, platform, google interests, etc. That's besides the point.
Chromebooks is on a legacy path, and whatever "promise" was made seems to be void. Realistically ran their numbers and are fully aware that the worst possible outcome is a 25$-voucher class action for a few thousand people.
Still way cheaper than having to support OS security and updates for ten years.
I will support you for 10 years for this car I am selling you now.
(things change in-between for a year)
I will support you less than 5 years for this car, if you buy now.
---
Google didn't do anything wrong legally, because the good sold a year ago is not the same as the good you are selling at current point.
YOu can have different support schedule.
Yes, it's very shady shit, because some people would find Chrome book in blogs/review a year ago thinking, oh 10 years, only to find out now it's less than that.
They did. Probably broke contract law (contract needn’t be a signed piece of paper saying “contract” at the top), and depending on the region, multiple consumer protection laws.
It isn’t criminal, but it is illegal mostly everywhere.
Good thing I did not trust Google 10 years ago either.
What we see here is a strategic shift by Google; you need
to connect this here, with the prior Google strategy of no
longer open sourcing Android-related stuff or with a huge
delay. This is not an isolated thing - Google is planning
Evil again, as usual.
May own pessimism (based on Google's history) aside, I would argue that while it may fulfill the words of the promise, it surely doesn't fulfill the intent: ChromeOS is a different beast than GooglebookOS. ffs, Google just spent a lot of effort publicizing exactly that.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49893653
So it's as low as 8 years instead of 10 for models purchased in the last 2 years (2034 being the cutoff), with those few devices being covered by a separate commitment to transfer them to GoogleOS by 2034.
Pretty lame detail to be enraged about, but it is Google and this is HN. This aligns with Apple's timeline for killing Intel MacBook support after releasing Apple Silicon (2029 being the last commitment).
Buying something that promises 10 years of updates and then having them turn around and say "lol just kidding you get 8" is pretty enraging.
Lining up with Apple is meaningless. Apple didn't promise updates for a longer period and then pull back.
I think you misunderstood the meaning of the word "promise".
Apple doesn't promise how many years of support any device gets.
Not completely true.
Apple promises all customers 5 years of hardware support past the last day the model was available for sale, and at least two years of limited hardware support thereafter.
In the UK, for iPhone 15 and later, Apple promises at least 5 years of software updates from the time that model was first offered for sale.
I would assume similar schedule outside the UK as well, but afaik it is only explicitly promised in the UK, due to regulatory requirements there.
For enterprise customers, Apple guarantee a minimum period of software security updates for macOS, but the exact period is kept confidential in the specific agreements.
Like the UK iPhone commitment, I assume the enterprise macOS schedule apply to all customers, and Apple just avoids publicly publishing it, I would guess to avoid some legal-induced headaches (which I personally think is the worst excuse, but I digress).
Discussed a lot here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49893653
Seems to be more reasonable than this title suggests?
Some comments: "So they have introduced a major change and said any older Chromebooks bought going forward will only get 8. So its not a retrospective reduction for existing customers." (Edit: actually I think this comment is wrong, if you bought a Chromebook 1 year ago, you'd only get 9 years of ChromeOS updates)
"From my understanding of the article, it sounds like ChromeOS support is getting pared back for those devices, but the devices themselves should still be supported, albeit via a (planned but not yet in existence) migration path to GooglebookOS."
These devices are usually bought on contract, with lots of lock in.
In particular, there are lots of schools getting screwed over financially. Maybe they’ll switch vendors, or use the money for education. Chromebook spending has a strong negative correlation with educational performance.
As a parent, I am supposed to have control over my kids’ personal information, but the schools firehose all the most sensitive kids’ info they have to an unlawful marketing firm that I do not trust. How do I opt out?
Surely those contracts specify whatever the schools need.
> How do I opt out?
Through your government. Maybe you could form a union strong enough but unlikely as you have more to lose than them, but both is a good idea.
Education contracts do not allow Google to use customer data for advertising.
But they still store the data.
Same goes for any third party service using Google Cloud. Google technically stores the data. They still can’t use it though.
“Can’t”
Correct, "can't". Are you suggesting they secretly violate the contract and use the data anyway?
Would anyone be shocked if they did? Tech firms seem to be immune from the law.
Remind me in 10 years when the story breaks.
Hey ChatGPT, set a reminder for 2036 to tell me whether Google was found not to secretly violate TOS of School Chromebooks and use the data harvested from them to create value for it's shareholders.
they do not. I don't work there anymore and don't have any particular goodwill towards the employer that laid me off last year but I can guarantee that any data related to the education sector is under extremely strict controls.
surely you can take two minutes out of your day and do basic websearches for privacy class actions and settlements
https://www.classaction.org/news/microsoft-collects-massive-...
https://www.k12dive.com/news/week-in-review-april-6-2026/816...
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/12/...
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/journalists-sue-goo...
https://www.courthousenews.com/google-settles-class-action-o...
None of those have anything to do with Google for Education contracts, and I hope you realize that.
I really do not understand how anyone can give Google the benefit of the doubt in 2026. They literally make the law. They only adhere to the law when it makes financial sense.
Yes
After PRISM and Room 641A, anything is possible.
Right but stuff like PRISM is the government getting data. In this scenario “the government shouldn’t trust Google with data because it might end up in the hands of the government” doesn’t really make a lot of sense.
Legally they cannot, no. And sure, they could violate contracts and break data protection laws. But they’d be trading an enormous hit on their reputation, who knows how many hundreds of millions in educational contracts for, what, some basic demographic data on kids? Data they’ll almost certainly be able to get via other means once the kid becomes an adult?
I don’t like Google’s involvement in education. I don’t like Google much at all. But we should still be able to examine this stuff rationally without devolving into conspiracy theories that don’t make logical sense.
"reputation"
Honestly reputation isn't the main concern if you're in leadership there, although it is absolutely a concern. The main concern is having to do another consent decree with either the EU or the US government. Those are a complete pain in the ass.
What is the point this comment is trying to make? We can say this for every SaaS company on the planet.
No, because not every SaaS company is Google.
Until they turn 16 or 18.
How do you propose they offer the contracted services like MDM, GSuite (email, Drive, etc) without storing any of the data?
That isn't what the OP was alleging. Of course they store data -- encrypted both in transit and at rest, and you can even activate client side encryption (https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/security/about-...) -- but that doesn't mean they exfiltrate, use or share your data for their own purposes.
They don't, they never have, and they won't (unless there is a blatant, illegal policy violation and lapse of controls internally). This is very similar to the controls and policies in place governing FedRAMP contracts or the control of PCI/financial or HIPAA/healthcare data.
Do you really think the engineering teams pour over those contracts when implementing new features?
Every single time? I sincerely doubt it.
Whatever logical business firewalls Google has between orgs for this kind of purpose seems pretty frail and thin from what I have seen reported.
This absolutely happens, there's a set of teams whose job it is to make sure it happens every time a system is going to be handling customer data. It's not left to the engineers to remember to do so.
They don't even need to know how to read the contract. But its not like engineers can ship whatever they want at a company the size of google.
So my question is, what have you seen reported and what makes you doubt it?
Tell me you've never worked at Google without telling me you've never worked at Google.
There are a lot of complaints you can legitimately levy, but "Google doesn't have enough of a compliance org to ensure eng behaves." is not one of them.
Yes, absolutely. Every microservice where I work is architecturally scrutinized by multiple groups over things like PCI, GDPR and SOX, with major features requiring review. And then third party auditors get to review stuff occasionally. PII is radioactive and PCI data is hard siloed.
If you work at a company that deals with education or HIPAA stuff, there's going to be even more of that.
Presumably Google aren't morons or criminals.
Homeschool, vote for free school choice, vote for getting the subsidized funds to where you actually send your kids. Solves most problems related to bad school policies.
> vote for getting the subsidized funds to where you actually send your kids
…which is what happens today with public schools. Your case only makes sense if you’re sending your kid to private school and would like public funds to help pay for it.
School vouchers allow richer families to go to private school while preventing lower income folks from doing so, exacerbating problems with educational achievement.
School vouchers are the only fair way to do schooling. Rich people paying for more expensive things isn’t bad. They just shouldn’t be forced to pay for the more expensive thing that they use as well as the less expensive thing they don’t use
Don't worry, they can afford it. They're rich right?
I mean they may not use their local library or parks either, but they ain't getting a refund for that.
I would like a refund on all public services I don't use. My house didn't burn down yesterday -- where's my fire department refund check?
I'm happy to offer to one. However check with your insurance company as they will have to pay put a much high rate for services should your house burn. This case who subscribe yearly to fire protection get a much better deal than those who don't.
If you opt out and want your house to burn that is only fine so long as you ensure the fire doesn't spread, if there is signs it might spread out have to pay inflated rates for fire service to protect the other houses that you can't burn down with yours.
Surely that depends entirely on your definition of the word “fair”. Is it fair that a lower income child is deprived of an opportunity to improve their life through education because their parents can’t afford it?
Ultimately the debate here is “should richer people have to contribute back to society to help the lives of the poorer people”? Of course you can say no to that. But the majority of society doesn’t agree.
At least in America aren’t school taxes extremely local? I’m not sure what you are suggesting actually happens, or at least you are exaggerating quite a bit.
Poor people typically don’t live in the same neighborhoods as wealthy people in America. Wealthy neighborhood public schools tend to have lavish facilities from the tax base, so it’s more like “wealthy guy X doesn’t want to pay for the very fancy facilities he isn’t even using”, not “wealthy guy X doesn’t want to pay to send his poor neighbor’s kid to school at all”.
Where I live all the districts in the metro area pool the money and divide it so the poor student is worth just as much as the rich student in a different district. (Assuming you don't go to a private school)
There are still schools rated much worse than others.
One of the best things about America is how highschools mix children from all backgrounds.
In my country your life is already decided at age 12- go to the wrong school and it's over.
“School choice” is just marketing language to disguise “funneling general tax dollars into private schools so wealthy people don’t have to pay for the privilege.”
Wealthy people don't want more students going to their children's schools. School choice is about funneling public funds to evangelical (aka extremist) Christian churches.
No. It's about pushing decisions out to the edges and empowering parents (and students) to help run the school system. To frame it this way is to deny the powerful evolution brought about by real choice.
Let’s see numbers proving this “powerful evolution.”
> or use the money for education
Totally agree. Would love far fewer computers in schools.
> Chromebook spending has a strong negative correlation with educational performance.
To be clear, this is only true because it’s been true for all screens.
Are you saying "the impact of Chromebooks, specifically, is unknown" or are you saying "the impact of Chromebooks is known to be better than the overall average" here?
The first (there are no studies comparing laptop brand to educational performance)
Isn't it retrospective to all customers who purchased in the last 2 years? They're not saying a Chromebook bought yesterday gets 10 years but one bought tomorrow only gets 8. They're saying they all end in 2034. If you bought one yesterday expecting 10 years of updates, you got screwed.
They're saying that you'll have to switch from ChromeOS to GoogleOS to keep getting updates for the full 10 years.
"All Chromebook platforms will get regular automatic updates for 10 years"
Are they going to make the switch automatic? It sure doesn't sound like the sort of transition that can be done automatically.
Yeah unless Google is giving you a Googlebook for free I don't think there is any issue saying Google is breaking the promise
It would be relatively straightforward to do automatically. Both OS's use a Linux kernel and Linux filesystems. Whether they will or should is a different question, but technically it's straightforward.
And what do you think the probability is that Google makes it a completely seamless update? I'd put it at well under 1% personally.
That's why this branding decision is a mess: Googlebooks are meant to be a good Gemini experience, and probably have some minimum requirements for local inference. The OS for these machines is all one probably very messy derivative of the same code base, where an android runtime is centrally important to having apps on that platform. But now the imperative is to center the AI experience, whether or not branding and product formulation can be made understandable.
Yeah I think you're right.
Could you clarify what you mean with reasonable here?
Reasonable would have been to deprecate support in 10 years, not 8.
Saying "yeah, we promised you 10 years of support, but if you just bought yours the last two years of that will only be supported if you switch to a completely different OS. But happily some of our devices have a direct migration path (if that's not yours, deal with it). Better hope the features you need will be available in our new OS by then, because right now they are not" is a major rugpull and not reasonable at all
“Completely different OS” might not affect the user experience all that much, though, since these devices are for running Chrome and it will still run Chrome. (And be better at other things like running Android apps, presumably.)
We don’t have any details about what the upgrade path will look like and it probably hasn’t been implemented yet, so this is all speculative.
If they didn’t do an OS change, they could still evolve it a lot over 10 years. Chrome could evolve too. You’re trusting the vendor to not screw up your workflow either way.
The downside to the user experience, so to speak, is that the newer OS will be more powerful / featureful, which will require updating a lot of managed policies for places like schools or locked-down businesses. They'll have to evaluate whether they want to deal with that and continue on the new OS and commit to it in the future, continue with it for a very short time then start all over again on windows or something, or just give up the time they were promised.
Of course, I don't think any schools are getting 10 years out of a chromebook, but some businesses might be.
Not that Google has done anything to make it more obvious but ChromeOS, the OS on GoogleBooks, and an obscure Linux you can put on random old PCs, are all related in interesting ways if not derived from the same project.
The practical issue in this case appears to be that GoogleBooks branding is meant to indicate they are good at running Gemini and other Google AI technologies. Chromebook aren't.
I doubt the entity called Google is of one mind about any of this.
Which obscure Linux?
It used to be Gentoo but not sure it is related anyway nowadays
My pet theory with this move from Chromebooks to Googlebooks is simply that Chromebooks have a major stink on their entire brand reputation, especially in the younger generation that went through school with terrible cheap (and likely used/damaged) Chromebooks being given to them for schoolwork.
I think if you say "Chromebook" around most 20-something and unders, they have an instant negative association with the word.
I guess it's true this could be their AOL disc.
Unfortunately I don't think that's going to work.
Unless you are the most hardcore Google fan, I don't see why you want to spend $1k on a Googlebook instead of a Windows laptop or MacBook at the same price range.
I was a hardcore Google fan and that's what made me hate them. Trying to invest in their ecosystem is like being in an abusive relationship. They can't commit to anything, so any product you make part of your workflow will be inevitably ripped away from you with an assured promise that the new, blatantly worse thing replacing it is so much better.
All of their output is entirely dependent on internal product owners using Google products as stepping stones to ladder climb. Once they replaced a product, or did a giant 2.0 revamp, they move on and no one wants to maintain it.
> They can't commit to anything
Site updated fast https://killedbygoogle.com
Agree from a branding standpoint. Idk what a googlebook is or is going to be, but if it’s kneecapped the same way Chromebook, Android, and “iPad OS” are, it’s never going to be a real competitor.
And by this I mean being captive to App Store/Play Store, the weird “everything has to be inside Chrome” thing of Chromebook, the obtuse window-management contortions of iPad, etc. People expect to be able to install software of their choice on a real computer. I already have a smartphone. I don’t need a second giant one with a keyboard.
If they want to actually compete they should put their weight behind a real Linux distribution that works normally. Totally OK to add all the custom features they want, like running Android apps. But just don’t make it so weird.
(And no, developer-mode side loading doesn’t change any of that.)
Because a Windows laptop is a nightmare?
Most work great with Linux or BSD
Most of them work very, very poorly with either of those, by ChromeOS standards. Webcams, touchpads, energy management, etc.
> My pet theory with this move from Chromebooks to Googlebooks is simply that Chromebooks have a major stink on their entire brand reputation
I think you're right. Many of the students I've talked to have an immediate reaction of "slow, limited" when asked about a Chromebook. The early years of under-powered hardware and limited storage/memory really did them a disservice when it comes to brand
My kid had a school supplied Chromebook for 4 years that she was allowed to keep. She hated it, constantly abused it and was thrilled to stop using it. It's now my spare/mobile work device and I LOVE IT. It has a rock solid build, small enough to use in my lap, touchscreen, still has a great battery and being a Chromebook... it just works! Kids are kinda dumb (I'm only half joking) and I think even if they were given MacBooks she would have shit all over it just because it was associated with school.
I was in a Chromebook pilot program when I was at Google. They gave me a different model every month or three as long as I kept giving them feedback. The build quality and usability varied wildly. Some models were so good I forgot I wasn’t on a real laptop. Some were so slow and unusable even on basic sites. Unfortunately the latter tended to be the ones that were so cheap that they ended up in schools.
The actual update:
> ChromeOS devices will continue to receive regular updates and security patches through mid-2034. For qualifying devices purchased today whose 10-year support lifecycle extends beyond 2034, Google is committed to supporting your transition to Googlebook OS, with many devices offering direct migration paths.
In other words, support will be offered until 2034. if you're buying a new Chromebook today and intend to keep it for longer than 8 years, you're doing so at your own risk.
Directly after the passage you quote:
> Google promised 10 years of updates for all Chromebooks, and it’s now breaking that promise for anyone buying a Chromebook between now and whenever the last Chromebook rolls off the production line
So, they're changing the promise from now on, and not breaking it for past users. Doesn't sound like they're breaking their promise to me.
They are breaking the promise for people who bought a Chromebook between 2024 and 2026.
Internally, someone definitely pushed back against that (“it’s only two extra years!”). Would’ve loved to hear what they were told.
Now that I say that, breaking the promise by two years might’ve been a compromise. Maybe management wanted five.
My 2015 Chromebook Pixel didn't even live that long.
First, it looked amazing - solid aluminum body, powerful i7 inside, 16G RAM, high-resolution touch-sensitive screen. And that amazing Google-styled LED strip that showed the charge when double-tapped.
Then the hardware started to fail. First, the shiny chrome letters saying "Chromebook" slid aside, revealing a glue-filled depression. I struggled to properly glue it back ever since. Then, the hinge mechanism seal failed, and a sticky substance started to leak from the back. Then the battery started to fail even though it was maybe 2 or 3 years old. And finally, the screen backlight started to fail, and bright spots started to appear from the edges to the point that it can no longer be used. Dead in 3 or 4 years.
For comparison, my also 2015 MacBook Pro 13 still works perfectly, except for the software - Apple also stopped updating macOS, and I'm considering just installing Linux on that otherwise fully functional hardware.
It should be illegal to force software obsolescence on otherwise functioning hardware, increasing the global e-waste footprint.
My Core i3 Pixelbook Go is still a peppy little web browser like it's always been. I'm going to replace the battery and see how the Linux install goes when the ChromeOS updates stop coming.
I also have a MBP from 2015 and have a recent OS install via OCLP. With only an i5 and 8GB it's slow to start, but once everything is going it's a reasonable UX if I stick to Safari.
I installed EndeavourOS on my 2015 MBP 13 and it's pretty great. Machine feels awesome. Had to have Codex patch a few small things (e.g. the fan thresholds, some power management stuff) and the speakers sound atrocious but it's super fast and extremely usable.
Replaced the battery with a $50 replacement one from Amazon myself, and I get like 5-6 hours of usage.
Googlebook is an absolutely awful name. Imagine being one of the people who worked on that. You collect your 200k paycheque, you go home to your family, you have to look your children in the eyes… knowing you called it a googlebook.
I know it’s satire but your comment made me think about the engineers working at Flock I’d bet most of them feel ashamed of it even in front of acquaintances.
The willful ignorance of the tech community is getting out of hand. This is the same thing as the "windows 10 is the last version of windows" discourse which stems from the absolutely abysmal state of tech journalism. You would think that by now that it would at least match financial journalism, but apparently we're fine settling for people who don't care about or understand what they are writing about.
This isn't an issue, the 10 years of support was promised for the hardware, not the software. They are fulfilling that promise by updating the devices to GooglebookOS.
Was “automatic“ a part of the promise? Now there’s some e.g. fixed income seniors sold on the inexpensive, hassle-free gear who have to deal with a lack of a “direct migration path“ in their later years?
Is Googlebook OS going to be "open source" like Chrome OS was (through Chromium)? Or is this also a forced transition from open -> closed? (that would make me far madder than simply forcing a migration).
I too would like to know this. I suspect there won't be an equivalent of ChromiumOS for Googlebook OS. Likely a combo of AOSP and proprietary closed source code.
It's a special version of Android that has a developer mode that unlocks a virtual (sandboxed) Linux environment. Because otherwise, no one would be able to use git (Android's filesystem abstraction is so slow for git, it's worse than NTFS).
Inside the virtual layer, you get real ext4/btrfs and real terminal applications will run at near-native speeds (supposedly) but their ability to interact with other applications (Android side) will be limited.
In short, it's not a real computer. Not a general-purpose one, anyway.
Google thinks that the selling point will be that enterprises can have their locked-down environment in the Android OS which allows remote wipe capabilities and heavily-sandboxed apps while it also allows developers the power to run whatever they want inside their little virtual Linux sandbox (e.g. VS Code). Sort of like WSL.
What they fail to understand is that enterprises will want just as much control over that sandboxed Linux environment as they have over the Android side of things. Making the entire purpose of the device moot.
Another idea behind the project is that it will allow Google to sell laptops that run processors that are traditionally used in smartphones without having to port the drivers and whatnot to general, open source Linux. Things like deep sleep states with rapid resume should "just work" because it's using Android which was what the vendor targeted when they made the chip.
The foundation of the entire device is hacks upon hacks in order to avoid doing the right thing (and possibly giving up market share to generic OEMs that might make their own ARM laptops).
The actual solution to all these issues is for mobile processor companies like Qualcomm to just be good Linux citizens.
> It's a special version of Android that has a developer mode that unlocks a virtual (sandboxed) Linux environment
Android for mobile (at least on Pixel phones) has this too.
The "special" bit is the desktop experience. New Pixels have a desktop mode if you plug them into a monitor but it's not as fleshed out and doesn't have their Gemini-ified cursor etc. At least not yet.
I think your notes re. ARM and Qualcomm hit the nail on the head though!
Is anyone surprised at this? Abandoning products in an untimely fashion is their specialty. I've never bought a hardware product from them for that reason, except for a 2nd gen Chromecast which was something whose longevity I didn't care too much about.
>Stuff like this should not be legal.
Alternatively, if users want legally binding contracts they should not treat promises as such, and demand a contract instead.
Statements a manufacturer makes about their device before purchase are usually treated as legally binding. Saying you provide 10 years of updates is just like saying your charger delivers 60W.
You don't need a contract for that, if the statement is untrue the product is now defective. And if done on purpose this is usually considered fraud
They’ve already got the necessary lawyers to negotiate the class action settlement and to send checks for a portion of the purchase price to every class member, and they calculated that this would still save them money vs. whatever the alternative was.
I would imagine whatever AI that google has in the coming years should make supporting multiple operating systems and hardware platforms trivial
I'm sure it was just a pinky promise with a million lines of small print saying they can actually do whatever they want regardless of what they said.
Also, in 2034 things will likely be radically different in computing. A local llm will likely either make such considerations entirely obsolete because support will be easy, or all current tech will be taken away from consumers anyway and everything will be much tighter controlled and monitored.
This doesn’t seem like such a big deal but it’s just more evidence that Google’s word is trash. Just don’t rely on them for anything and you’ll be fine
A maybe not-so-silver lining is that the major consumers of Chromebooks (schools, mostly) probably won't see their hardware survive that long.
You’d be surprised I’m sure some schools did have it last that long
I'm on the school board for our school, and they last a few years if we're lucky. There are some that survive up to maybe 7, but they accrete so much damage by then. While I think it would have been ideal for G to keep it 10 years, I think in practice it won't matter for many people. Most students are awfully hard on those things after all.
I work in e-waste recycling. I've seen hundreds, maybe thousands of Chromebooks come in from schools. They are five years old maximum, and most are in pretty bad shape.
Curious that we have expectations for google to maintain such promises. Any other major companies with similar level of expectations?
For anyone currently owning a Chromebook and worrying about this:
https://docs.mrchromebox.tech
FWIW, my C13 Yoga (Morphius) runs full-fat Linux significantly better than it ever ran ChromeOS
The only reason I'd consider buying a Chromebook is to install Linux on it... Same is true for Googlebook.
Definitely only reasonable usecase...
I even wouldn't. They're missing the meta key which is a pain, especially as an i3 user
Do they have a caps lock waiting to be remapped?
This is the first time I've heard of this promise for 10 years of updates.
That seems quite impressive when compared against the 2-3 years of updates android phones historically got.
> android phones historically got
Well this is up to the phone OEM's (Samsung, Sony, etc) not Google themselves. Google appears to be asserting more control over the software stack of these Googlebooks.
New Pixel phones get 7 years of support.
So who is taking any promises from companies 100% true
Google breaking promises? Whatever next?
Recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49893653
Are the people who made the promise even still at Google?
It reminds me of those sketchy companies on Amazon promising "lifetime guarantee" on their products when they know already they're gonna close shop and reopen on a completely different brand the very next year.
If those people made the promise on behalf of Google while working there and being in a position to make such promises, it's Google's problem now.
(If they _weren't_ in said position, it's still Google's problem but with some caveats provided Google actually treats it as abuse of authority.)
I mean, yes... in theory.
In practice, if there has been some kind internal restructuring, the infrastructure required to keep those previous promises probably isn't there anymore. Try contacting Google support, I guess.
Also, unless such promises were put on paper in some kind of contract AND without the ever present "We reserve the right to change the terms of this agreement partially or fully in the future" fine line, it was just some kind of wishful thinking by whatever manager was in charge of the Chromebooks project at the time.
Let's be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if the product EULA says somewhere "This device is licensed to you, not sold. You are granted a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, and personal license to use the device for your private, non-commercial use."
The whole point of corporations is that the assets (and liabilities) created by the people working on behalf of the corporation outlive the term of their employment.
They don't (or at least shouldn't) get to keep the assets without also honouring the liabilities.
Sorry, I thought it was obvious I was just pointing out that probably none of the previous management team (and consequently decisions) are still left. You can switch "people" with project plan, platform, google interests, etc. That's besides the point.
Chromebooks is on a legacy path, and whatever "promise" was made seems to be void. Realistically ran their numbers and are fully aware that the worst possible outcome is a 25$-voucher class action for a few thousand people.
Still way cheaper than having to support OS security and updates for ten years.
I will support you for 10 years for this car I am selling you now.
(things change in-between for a year)
I will support you less than 5 years for this car, if you buy now.
---
Google didn't do anything wrong legally, because the good sold a year ago is not the same as the good you are selling at current point.
YOu can have different support schedule.
Yes, it's very shady shit, because some people would find Chrome book in blogs/review a year ago thinking, oh 10 years, only to find out now it's less than that.
They did. Probably broke contract law (contract needn’t be a signed piece of paper saying “contract” at the top), and depending on the region, multiple consumer protection laws.
It isn’t criminal, but it is illegal mostly everywhere.
They did retroactively change the deal for people who purchased chromebooks between 2024 and now.
Good thing I did not trust Google 10 years ago either.
What we see here is a strategic shift by Google; you need to connect this here, with the prior Google strategy of no longer open sourcing Android-related stuff or with a huge delay. This is not an isolated thing - Google is planning Evil again, as usual.
Stuff like this should not be legal?
Isn’t it illegal? It’s actual false advertising. You can sue them, it’s just no one has.
What exactly is illegal here? Providing an update to a supported OS in last two years?
Advertising ten years of support, then, post-purchase of the device, reducing that period by 2 years.
Except that they didn't reduce the period, they'll migrate people to new OS.
May own pessimism (based on Google's history) aside, I would argue that while it may fulfill the words of the promise, it surely doesn't fulfill the intent: ChromeOS is a different beast than GooglebookOS. ffs, Google just spent a lot of effort publicizing exactly that.
I can't be the only one who thinks Googlebook is the least appealing name I may have ever heard for a hardware product.
It is okay, it will be discontinued shortly anyways.
funny that only Apple is the only company that I trust enough to deliver longterm update
Since when has Google ever been trustworthy?
This is just standard operating procedure. Remember --- "Don't be Evil".
Long term support is not the Google way
As a great philosopher once said "Don't be eval".. if you cant be compared, you cant be cornered..