At the start of the Covid pandemic, back in 2020, lots of schools needed a way for students to attend from home. They selected Chromebooks. Chromebooks were less expensive than Windows PCs or MacBooks, easier to administrate, and less vulnerable to hacking (by bad guys and students alike).
Schools bought a lot of them.
And now, those same schools are learning that Chromebooks come with expiration dates. Many of them have three-year life spans.
The schools -- or rather, the people who manage budgets for schools -- are not happy.
There is a certain amount of caveat emptor here, which the school IT and budget administrators failed to perform, but I would rather focus on the life spans of Chromebooks.
Three years isn't all that long in the IT world. How did Google (who designs the Chromebook specification) select that term?
(We should note that not all Chromebooks have three-year life spans. Some Chromebooks expire after five or even seven years. It is the schools that selected the three-year Chromebooks that are unhappy. But let's focus on the three-year term.)
(We should also note that the Chromebook life span is for updates. The Chromebooks continue to work; Google simply stops updating ChromeOS and the Chrome browser. That may or may not be an issue; I myself used an old Chromebook for years after its expiration date. Eventually, web sites decided that the old version of Chrome was not worth talking to, and I had to replace the Chromebook.)
I have an idea about the three-year life span. I don't work at Google, and have no contacts there, so I'm speculating. I may be wrong.
It seems to me that Google selected the three-year life span to tailor Chromebooks not to schools but to large corporations. Large corporations (or maybe IT vendors), back in the 1990s, convinced Congress to adjust the depreciation schedules for IT equipment, reducing the expected life to three years. This change had two effects. First, the accelerated schedule lets corporations write off the expense of IT equipment faster. Second, IT vendors convinced large corporations to replace their IT equipment every three years. (The argument was that it was cheaper to replace old PCs rather than maintain them.)
With corporations replacing PCs every three years, it made sense for Google to build their Chromebooks to fit that schedule. While PCs did not have built-in expiration dates, corporations were happy to replace their PCs on that three-year schedule.
A three-year expiration gave Google several advantages. They could design the Chromebooks with less expensive components. They could revise the ChromeOS operating system rapidly and not worry about backwards compatibility. Google could sell the idea of planned obsolescence to the makers of Chromebooks (HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc.) as a market that would provide a steady demand.
Again, this is all speculation. I don't know that Google planned any of this.
But it is consistent.
Schools are upset that Chromebooks have such a short supported life. Google made Chromebooks with those short support life spans because the target was corporations. Corporations replaced IT equipment every three years because of tax laws and the perceived costs of maintaining older hardware.
If we take away anything from this, perhaps we should note that Google was focussed on the corporate market. Other users, such as schools or non-profits or individuals, were possibly not considered in their calculations.
