Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Design quirks, limited parts, and other ways Chromebooks frustrate repairs

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 95 posts

Re: Design quirks, limited parts, and other ways Chromebooks frustrate repairs

#71

Post by 908B64B197 »

jeffbee wrote: post #32
TOMDM wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may be out of touch, but do people really expect a $200 laptop to last more than a few years?

In daily use by children! Both of these articles, by the same author, fail to engage with the economic design point of the Chromebook. Only the most bozotic k-12 IT department is scrounging keyboards on eBay. The normal people bought their Chromebooks from CDW with 4-years repair or replace contracts, and they don’t care where the parts come from. And nobody wants to be upgrading machines piecemeal the way the author…

> fail to engage with the economic design point of the Chromebook

And that the only reason Chromebooks are deployed there in the first place is that they are inexpensive.

Re: Design quirks, limited parts, and other ways Chromebooks frustrate repairs

#72

Post by mardifoufs »

carlivar wrote: post #29
dazc wrote: post #24

I have two Chromebooks, both over 8 years old. The eldest, an ASUS, I gave to my dad and he uses it everyday. Aside from the odd security issue (he'll install any extension he's told to) it works just as well as it when it was new. The other, a Toshiba, I've dragged around the world with me, has had one repair, a battery replacement, and, again, works fine. Chromebooks are cheap but reliable devices that ought not to…

So you have a data point of 2 Chromebooks versus the school I.T. admins in the article that manage thousands, and you think your sample size wins? How about the pointless bezel changes illustrated in the article? Drop your Chromebooks on the floor to crack the bezel, try to replace them, and get back to us for further data in your sample.

Considering how bad and dubiously sourced the article is... yes, actually, anecdotes might very well be just as good.

Re: Design quirks, limited parts, and other ways Chromebooks frustrate repairs

#73

Post by ghaff »

mikestew wrote: post #27
smoldesu wrote: post #4

4 years isn't that bad. I'd wager the average Intel Macbook is going to run out of support sooner.

You don’t need to wager, you can look this stuff up. Which is probably what you should have done before posting.

Not quite. 2015s didn’t get Ventura. (Don’t know if that’s across the board or not but is with my two models.) Still getting some minor updates.

Re: Design quirks, limited parts, and other ways Chromebooks frustrate repairs

#74

Post by ericpauley »

gpm wrote: post #15
wewtyflakes wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm typing this reply on 2013 Macbook Pro; maybe I got lucky with this one, but it doesn't show signs of stopping.

It is however no longer receiving updates https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/some-macs-are-gettin... As the article points out, Google's promise of 8 years of updates is actually longer than the average mac receives.

No longer receiving feature updates. Monterey is still receiving security updates.

Re: Design quirks, limited parts, and other ways Chromebooks frustrate repairs

#75

Post by denton-scratch »

> having to replace an entire Chromebook keyboard because a single key doesn't work.

Stopped reading there.

I'm typing on a Lenovo Thinkpad L430; it has a couple of defective keys - they're arrow keys, the keys I use most often, because I like to scroll using the keyboard.

I bought replaccement keys online, and had to buy them from Poland (Lenovo don't sell them). You have to go through a rigmarole to select your model, and then you have to select the key you want, and then eyeball the key and compare it to closeups on the order form.

Two weeks later they arrived; they look OK, but they don't fit. They're too big. You can't tell just by looking, but they're a fraction of a millimetre bigger than the hole they're supposed to fit in.

I gave up, and replaced the Thinkpad (a replacement keyboard would have cost as much as the Dell Inspiron I bought second-hand).

Re: Design quirks, limited parts, and other ways Chromebooks frustrate repairs

#76

Post by dotcoma »

soulofmischief wrote: post #36
dotcoma wrote: post #28

Crapware. Just like Android.

Android is an entire family of devices. Surely your comment is made in jest.

I’m not saying Apple is perfect, but I strongly dislike companies that stop supporting their operating systems after only a few years.

Re: Design quirks, limited parts, and other ways Chromebooks frustrate repairs

#77

Post by ncphil »

"The sample size could have been larger". Yeah, like _way_ larger. So could the institutions represented. _Scarsdale_? Really? What about NYC, LA, Chicago? As others have written here, you would have to be insane to think a $200 device like that would last more than a couple of years. Or a school administrator who got and keeps their job by sucking up to an even more clueless district superintendent, under the not-so-watchful eye of an idiot school board. "A fool and his money are soon parted".

Re: Design quirks, limited parts, and other ways Chromebooks frustrate repairs

#79

Post by Gigachad »

TOMDM wrote: post #21
rolph wrote: post #11

Schools bought millions of Chromebooks in 2020 — and three years later, they’re starting to break https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/21/23691840/us-pirg-educatio...

I may be out of touch, but do people really expect a $200 laptop to last more than a few years?

Especially in the hands of students. My school deployed MacBook airs to everyone which are perfectly capable of lasting just about forever but a good chunk of them were dropped, destroyed, liquid damaged, etc by the end of the year.

Re: Design quirks, limited parts, and other ways Chromebooks frustrate repairs

#80

Post by NoZebra120vClip »

Now this is by no means unique to Chromebooks, but my recent experience may explain why the repair pipeline may be clogged a bit.

I have a brand-new Chromebook which is still within the vendor return period.

I was having trouble with HDMI/sleep mode, so I contacted Google One Support. They don't really do much ChromeOS support, so after misdirecting me a couple times, they referred me to the manufacturer.

So I contacted the manufacturer, and with a little troubleshooting (and a bizarre keypress combo that the support rep would not explain to me, he said "just press it and it will resolve glitches") they determined that it must be a hardware issue and prompted me to begin the RMA process.

Now I was offended, because they didn't actually know what the issue was, they had just exhausted a few very simple troubleshooting steps with my cooperation, and they were out of ideas, so it must be defective hardware for RMA!

I have also run into similar support issues with my phone, where the first troubleshooting step is to factory reset. No effort at identifying the cause, just nuke the thing from orbit. (In that case, it was a very recent system update to blame, and of course there is no way to roll back system updates on non-rooted Android phones.)

But I digress. If I had sent my Chromebook back to the factory, they would've decided there is no hardware failure (I can do diagnostics just as well as they can) and it would go back on the shelf or back to me with no modifications. And then I would have lost time with my computer, the repair place would've wasted time with diagnostics, and my HDMI/sleep issue would still not be resolved.

I am contacting Support for issues that are not showstoppers. They are not preventing me from starting the computer or getting work done. It was just an annoyance that the computer stays awake. I found a workaround already. Just try not to do these silly RMAs, OK?

Post reply on HN