No my man, they stop getting security updates. If you think cash strapped K12 institutions would happily toss useable Chromebooks out because they don’t get feature updates, then you are dead wrong.
There is going to be a massive K12 money issue coming in about 3-4 more years. Everyone who didn’t have a 1 to 1 program in effect took all that COVID money and threw it at their Tech depts to enable 1 to 1. Those grants, for those amounts, aren’t gonna be here 3-4 years from now. I honestly have no idea what poorer districts are gonna do, but it’s gonna be a fucking reckoning.
Source: Former Ed-Tech Tech
Interesting, I bought my Chromebooks from schools and they all are still getting security updates haha, so I guess it’s a moot point. They get supported past the period at which a school keeps them before replacement. 6 years does seem like a long time for schools to hold on and that’s just for feature updates. If the security updates are lasting longer… Well. There that. And considering the basis of all things on them are based around the browser, which will get updates indefinitely then I guess the concern just isn’t there. I actually am a contractor for one of the poorest public schools in the US and even they don’t keep their computers around for more than 4
It’s likely they’re purchasing 1-2 year old devices then. The AUE starts ticking the second the first unit gets made available for sale. The district I worked had over half of its 12 schools as Title 1, and we held on to every device to the point that they expired over the summer or were replaced summer prior if they were going to expire during the school year.
Don’t let ChromeOS and it’s penchant for WebApps fool you. It took Google months to patch the firmware shims, and it’s not like they had any suggestion other than “You can tell it’s Shimmed by the enrollment date” “Just configure a report to spit out enrollment dates after X/Y/Z to locate Shimmed devices”. Never mind the fact that every new board meant a new enrollment date so we had to physically keep tabs on what potential repairs were being done.
I hate Chromebooks, btw.