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Chromebooks generally aren’t engineered with high-quality materials. Sure, there are premium offerings, including models in the Acer Chromebook Plus or ASUS ExpertBook series. However, most are cheaply made and have flimsy hinges or bodies that break. If you take good care of them, realistically, how long will they last?
The answer is tricky because there are two elements: hardware and software. Google’s software update support for Chromebooks is between eight and ten years — Chromebooks get ten years of automatic updates. However, that’s exclusively software support, which relates to the Chrome OS user experience. That doesn’t pertain to hardware, including internal components, the case, screen, and other necessary features. If you, say, drop your Chromebook and break the screen after two years, it won’t last the full decade. What about failures beyond your control? If the storage fails, there’s no recourse unless you’re highly skilled. Chromebooks are not upgradable and sometimes unrepairable.
A popular model, the Acer Chromebook Plus 514, has over 300 global Amazon ratings and a review score of 4.3 out of 5 stars. Filtering by one-star reviews, we find users have problems with keystrokes, the display, and unexpected reboots. Several users say problems began after a year of ownership. A Lenovo Ideapad with over 10K reviews (and a 4.4 out of 5 star rating) has similar commentary. Users experience regular malfunctions, screen and power issues, and battery discharge problems. One user claims it’s the “worst laptop [they’ve] ever owned.” You can argue these comments are cherry-picked, but across Chromebook listings, the pattern is common. Some people have problems, others don’t. Digging deeper reveals them. Overall, users report a real-world lifespan of three to five years when nothing goes wrong. Recently, I had an HP Chromebook die that I bought in 2019. The timeline tracks.
What does the data show for Chromebook lifespans?
Consumer Reports has a great list of Chromebooks with decent user ratings, highlighting many Chromebook models that are reliable and may exhibit fewer issues. By user reviews alone, even across retailer sites like Amazon and Best Buy, there are a ton of Chromebooks that have high marks from owners. There are Chromebooks from Lenovo, Asus, Acer, and Samsung that users say are actually worth the money after some hands-on time. But what does the data show?
The average lifespan of a Chromebook is about 7.6 years across all brands and use cases. Of course, individual ratings differ from brand to brand and even within them, depending on how the models are constructed. Comparatively, consumer-grade Chromebooks have an average lifespan of 6.9 years compared to those used in government (8.3 years) or academic (8.1 years) settings. This could be due to a perceived obsolescence or a combination of other factors, such as frequency of use. Education and government models are often built to military-grade standards for durability, which means ruggedness is prioritized.
However, the lower consumer-grade durability is offset by a lower cost versus traditional laptops. You can find cheap Chromebooks for less than $200, sometimes even way cheaper, albeit with minimal hardware specifications. There’s a reason why they are so cheap, and a lot of it has to do with their low-cost, entry-level design focus. You wouldn’t necessarily expect cheaper offerings to last for up to a decade.
