As the Covid pandemic took classrooms online in early 2020, school districts found themselves in need of bulk purchases of affordable laptops to send home with their students. Many people thus switched to Chromebooks.

Three years later, the US Public Interest Research Group Education Fund (PIRG) says in a new analysis titled Chromebook Churn that many of these batches are already breaking. This might cost districts money; according to PIRG, “doubling the lifespan of Chromebooks could result in $1.8 billion in savings for taxpayers,” adding that the defunct laptops also generate a significant amount of e-waste.

One of the major issues is repairability. Chromebooks, on average, are more difficult to upgrade and repair than Windows computers. This is due, in part, to the fact that replacement parts are significantly more difficult to come by — notably for items like screens, hinges, and keyboards, which are particularly prone to the drops, jolts, jostles, and spills that come with daily usage.

Researchers discovered, for example, that over half of the replacement keyboards advertised for Acer Chromebooks were out of stock online, and that more than a third cost  “$89.99 or more, which is nearly half the cost of a typical $200 Chromebook." According to PIRG, some IT departments have resorted to purchasing extra batches of Chromebooks only for their components.

According to the report, the high price tags should make schools "reconsider Chromebooks as a cost-saving strategy."

Chromebook Churn also discusses the Chromebook's auto-update expiration date, which has been a source of contention for users for years.

Short expiration date

While Google currently guarantees eight years of automatic updates for Chromebooks, that period begins when Google certifies a Chromebook, not when a school receives that Chromebook, which can take much longer. When a school has successfully purchased, received, set up, and deployed a fleet of student Chromebooks, expiration is typically "four to five years away," according to the report.

“When the software expires just a few years into a device’s use, schools are left with boxes of computers with working components that end up as electronic waste, and the need to buy even more Chromebooks,” according to the paper.

Because of the short expiration dates, it is more difficult for schools to resell their gadgets, forcing some to spend even more to recycle them.

According to PIRG, “doubling the lifespan of the 31.8 million Chromebooks sold in 2020 could cut emissions by 4.6 million tons CO2e, equivalent to taking 900 thousand cars off the road for a year.” The group recommends that Google eliminate the Automatic Update Expiration system, that its OEM partners produce “a minimum 10% overstock”  of replacement parts, and that components be better standardized among Chromebook models.

It also advises that Google make it easy to unenroll Chromebooks from remote administration and install external operating systems (namely, Linux), making post-AUE resale more appealing.  “Not only is the choice of operating system a consumer right, it would extend the resale and reuse value of the laptop by years,” the authors write.

“We’ve worked diligently with our hardware partners to increase the years of guaranteed support Chromebooks receive, and since 2020, we now provide eight years of automatic updates, up from five years in 2016. We also are always working with our device manufacturing partners to increasingly build devices across segments with post-consumer recycled and certified materials that are more repairable, and over time use manufacturing processes that reduce emissions. 

Regular Chromebook software updates add new features and improve device security every four weeks, allowing us to continuously iterate on the software experience while ensuring that older devices continue to function in a secure and reliable manner until their hardware limitations make it extremely difficult to provide updates.”