Thousands of Chromebooks Are ‘Expiring,’ Forcing Schools to Toss Them Out

As thin, light, and inexpensive as Chromebooks can be, they come with a major caveat: short life expectancies. Chromebooks aren’t just a little flimsier than the average laptop—they’re shipped with software “death dates” that render them useless three to six years after release. And because schools are some of Chromebooks’ biggest customers, they’re now swamped with bricked hardware.

The Chromebook crisis is apparent at northern California’s Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), where thousands of laptops have reportedly stopped working. Sam Berg, the district’s computer science coordinator, told Silicon Valley’s Mercury News that while Oakland students can gain tech repair experience through an OUSD internship, the expired Chromebooks simply aren’t fixable. “They’re designed to be disposable,” Berg said. 

The district was forced to replace 3,851 laptops last year after the Chromebooks reached their built-in death dates. Over the next five years, that number will skyrocket to 40,000 as more than 60 Chromebook models expire. The district’s tech internship for teenagers will attempt to salvage as much hardware as possible, but most will need to be recycled. 

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Google told OUSD the baked-in death dates are necessary for security and compatibility purposes. As Google continues to iterate on its Chromebook software, older devices supposedly can’t handle the updates. But this illustrates a particularly contentious issue in modern technology: planned obsolescence. From smartphones and computers to printers and even kitchen appliances, consumers have learned to purchase things with the knowledge that they’ll need to be replaced in just a few years. Not only is this expensive, but it produces a shocking amount of e-waste, less than a quarter of which is recycled. 

Chromebooks’ built-in expiration dates aren’t totally new, but they still put schools between a rock and a hard place. More educational programs now use tech to engage students, and Chromebooks are by far the cheapest options for school districts interested in bringing laptops to the classroom. Those that purchased palettes of Chromebooks before or during 2020—which was also the spur of the pandemic-induced remote learning shift—are out of luck, as these models are sure to expire sometime between now and the next couple of years. 

Newer models, however, are expected to last a bit longer. Faced with countless complaints, Google somewhat recently agreed to begin guaranteeing Chromebook lifespans of at least eight years. This means new-ish models (AKA those built in 2021 or later) should last longer, staving off the pile-up of defunct hardware currently occurring at school districts like OUSD. At this point, that’s probably the best districts will be able to get.