Planned obsolescence is annoying when it comes to light bulbs. But for general purpose computers and TV sets, planned obsolescence should be illegal. When buying a general purpose computer mac, pc or chromebook, the manufacturers should be imposed to make sure the computer can run an open source operating system too.
Apple have not paid anything as far as I know to the community that are working on drivers to make Linux run on their M1 and M2 Apple Silicon Macs. Most of the software the powers the Chromebooks is open source.
Include phones to this list of general compute devices. The 2–3 year support of Android phones is a joke, but increasing it to 5 years is just a kick of the can rather than a solution. When an OEM’s support ends, firmware should be required to be open sourced so the devices can live on for other purposes instead of being a paperweight or e-waste.
Just for shear curiosity can you give more info on what and where it is still in production. I find stories about outdated / obsolete hardware still being used for productive work intriguing.
Thanks. I believe there was an article in Nature, or something along those lines, that was about this very thing; old hardware and software being held together using chewing gum and baling wire by the researchers so they could continue their research.
The argument is that by creating unnecessary waste they are imposing an externality on everyone. Why should societies that control the rules of trade within them allow a company to force extra infrastructure on everyone for safely disposing of a much higher level of waste?
I think the suggested laws to combat this would be that companies must allow users to take control of their own devices once official support is no longer available. Paying enthusiasts to create a distribution of Linux for the device would be a cheap way of ensuring your devices fit that kind of law. It's just a way of saying that devices must be reusable, even without further manufacturer support.
I had an original ipad, and it was almost unusable within a year of me buying it because of forced software upgrades it couldn't take.
I think the OP means Apple should pay because they will provide support after Apple declares EOL. And the OP argues support beyond EOL should be mandated by law.
At very least, manufacturers should be asked to unlock things and provide documentation to let the community support devices. It's incredible the amount of devices that have perfectly fine hardware but are crippled due to the lack of software updates.
After selling your streetlamps to cities far and wide, you have decided that your lamps won't be supported anymore, and their critical control software won't even be updated for security issues.
Instead of leaving them unsafe to use, you need to make it so the buyer can continue to use them safely, even though the light output may be reduced or they might not be as cutting-edge (eye-friendly wavelength, for example) as your new offerings.
Everyone is free to update to the new lamps if they want to, but there should be no artificial reason to force them to do so.
I think paid it's the wrong word, but I agree that at least they should offer drivers for the hardware you own. Like if I get an AMD card, they provide drivers for Linux, and windows. At least they should for devices they don't plan on supporting anymore themselves.
A little bit idealistic, but we should make Apple accountable of their "eco friendly" image, we already have enough e-waste, to keep dumping good hardware to the trash because it not longer has support from Apple, despite working perfectly fine and safe with other OS like Linux.
I have rebuild a dozen of ewaste atom laptops into smart home controller displays with 3d printer. Hardware wise it went fine. But make them working reliable is next to impossible. Lots of problems with linux gui/wifi drivers. Anything graphic and gui related is a mess. Updates just not worth it because they can kill the boot. In order to get stability you need router style firmware with Squashfs blob . With outdated kernel that at least let you have hardware accelerated output and no wifi dropouts after 2-3 days uptime, and you can reset it without fear of bricking. I can’t tell people to admin and google for linux problems daily.
So these devices will die under Linux quickly anyway as kernel development direction is to make painful, by wasting time of backporting, fixing and recompiling old drivers, to use any old hardware.
Slightly off topic, but I'm wondering if alternatives aren't safer. Does anyone have any experience with Brunch Framework https://github.com/sebanc/brunch and its compatibility with actual chromebooks? Context: I own a Samsung Chromebook Pro (codename Caroline), which goes out of support in June...
I've used it on non-chromebook x86-64 machines with no issues. It will use an official image, so I can't tell you what will happen if that image goes end-of-life (probably the same as if you were using the actual hardware - end of updates). You'll probably want to find a similar machine's image to start with, one that won't be EOL any time soon.
I installed it couple of years ago. I still get package updates from the Ubuntu base repo on which it's based. But it's true that there haven't been any newer OS releases since.
My machine keeps going nevertheless. I only use it for light browsing while I commute, so I'm not that bothered about lacking OS updates. As long as it turns on, connects to WiFi, and opens Firefox, I'm content.
I would also migrate away from Ubuntu because of the snap lock-in. Just have not decided where to go with low end machines (2 GB are enough to give you a decent experience for basic tasks.) But not if you run everything in a container or insist that you must keep dozens of tabs open.)
That only works for a selected set of chromebook. And you still have an end of life date that is fixed.
My girl friend's school is having to dispose of about 300 chromebooks for precisely this reason. Most are still functional, but now unsupported. They would be totally usable if they weren't being deliberately binned by Google.
This is an environmental crime, as is a lot of support ending the useful lives of devices. These externalities are created by companies who make huge profits, and don't have to deal with what they have created. I've thought this for years, but part of the problem is that everyone is convinced they need to use windows (they don't), and everyone likes new and shiny.
As a concrete example: I have a Thinkpad L440 which is certified for Flex and receives support until 2026. The L440 runs any Linux X86 distro fine (EFI or legacy Bios).
I assume you never used them for YouTube/zoom/meet? Whether you like or not streams become heavy - older devices cannot handle. With spectre/meltdown patches things became slower for these older devices. For reasons beyond comprehension everyone wants to see only 120fps or hfr. If you see all k12sysadmin forums you can see these are also motivated by the school admin - they get good contracts from Apple/others to upgrade or lose out. Parents too want shiny devices for their children.
> environmental crime, as is a lot of support ending the useful lives of devices.
It is the same like all large companies selling their windows 7 or 10 device (after 3 years of leasing) or TV. Ideally there could be FOREVER updateable windows version with only security support/patches - basic version.
The WORLD business model is bad for environment/world.
At least all these Chromebooks will be sold in eBay (for cheap) via resellers that are used well by linux community.
Here's to hoping for another sale of Lenovo 11e, quad-core models: small enough to strip into "server stacks," and just enough SSD to practice home lab stuff, without too much fuss.
I realized if I wanted an (automated) testable staging environment, I would need to "duplicate the stack," in a sense: a test firewall and a production one; a test router--and a production one.
We really need proper e-waste and obsolescence laws.
I.e. once official support ends the company must release datasheets, schematics, PCB designs, a FOSS bootloader and firmware, etc. - so that old devices can be repaired and re-purposed.
It'd increase the threat of cheap clones - but that's not necessarily a bad thing either.
Many of these devices never had these to begin with, and the firmware came from the SoC manufacturer not the gadget manufacturer. That'd be a huge chain reaction rippling through the supply chain; unlikely.
I can't even imagine the amount of money Apple, NVidia & Intel would sink into lobbying against needing to disclose internal datasheets.
I wish, but wishing isn't helping much. In the meanwhile, I buy Framework laptops...
Yes a no. A Sandy bridge computer (something like a 2500k i5) it's still perfectly capable to run as a home computer (and even light game, or pro tasks). And if you add a light distro to the mix and a GPU, it's even better than a new Celeron cpu you can get from current gen Intel.
I do not own any Chromebooks yet, but have a bunch of Chromeboxes, which essentially are the same thing in desktop small form factor, and liberated all of them over the years using the unscrew+script method described at https://mrchromebox.tech.
They may not be very fast, especially the older ones, though still have their use.
I turned for example a Asus CN62 (CPU: i3-5010U) to a Kodi media center, and it flies compared to the Raspberry Pi4 I used before. Only drawback compared to the RPi is the lack of native CEC support, which I solved by adding an external Pulse Eight dongle.
That's different I was talking about (though not specified) chromebooks such as Toshiba Chromebook 2 and C100P (I really like this ones body) but I only use it to open a couple tabs... can't do say development work on JS with it (react) the install/build takes too long.
edit: granted for the TCB2 I was able to run a VM in it (virtualbox even) so that's something.
In general I am not the person to drop $2K on a new MBP or something. I like buying old flagships, the issue is their battery is usually not that great anymore and the replacements are usually fake (bad capacity/faked eeprom).
Last edit... even a past flagship though starts to suck eg. I have a 2015 i7 MBP and you can start to notice it struggle (dev work again) regarding getting hot/fans, slowing down. it is clean
Yeah I understand what you're saying eg. websites now are MB's in size.
Maybe I missed the point of this article "revive".
edit: another random anecdote, I bought a palm top that was released in the late 90's and while it's cool/nostalgia, that's another example of a pretty much useless thing in today's needs/software-hardware compatibility
idk, I hoard a lot of my old phones... I feel bad just discarding them since they still work... but what are you going to use them for, maybe wire them up and try to use them as a cluster idk.
Yeah I do (use UBO). In my case I was trying to use it for web development eg. run npm/react and yeah it was bad. This was a Rockchip 1.8GHz Processor (C100P)
I had better luck with a 2.16 GHz celeron (Toshiba Chromebook 2)
Other thing is say you visit YouTube and the tiles don't all immediately load in, that's an example of lowering performance (because time moves on, web grows).
> The other part of this article will go into the reasonings behind this, and talk more about planned obsolecnece, computers, capitalism, permacomputing, and post-scarcity anti-capitalist futures.
Apple have not paid anything as far as I know to the community that are working on drivers to make Linux run on their M1 and M2 Apple Silicon Macs. Most of the software the powers the Chromebooks is open source.