Numlock News: Ernie Smith on the rising right to repair

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Ernie Smith, writer of the brilliant Tedium newsletter and who wrote Google Extends Chromebook Life by 2 Years After Right-to-Repair Campaign for Motherboard. Here's what I wrote about it:

Lots of schools rely on Chromebooks for their students, but there are a number of issues with the Chromebook business model that make the computers liable to generate e-waste. One issue is that each Chromebook is essentially a time bomb, as regardless of if they work Google will simply stop maintaining them after eight years. Yesterday, following pressure to allow more utility for late-life Chromebooks, Google announced that for any machine released 2021 or later, that expiration date will instead be 10 years of automatic updatesbefore the devices are bricked.

Ernie is such a good read, if you’re not already subscribed to Tedium I really must insist, he’s one of the best at covering fascinating tech and history stories that ab…