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Google Wants to Turn Your Old Mac into a Chromebook With Chrome OS Flex

Seanm87 said:
Why? Why would anyone do this?
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Why not? Many people have old laptops gathering dust. They are too old to run modern operating systems, but the older systems are not up-to-date on security.

And Chrome OS is useful. As one example, because of Apple's inattention to the education space over the last 5-10 years, Chromebooks have become extremely widespread, and the preferred choice for many school districts. This would let parents put Chromebooks in the hands of their children without having to buy them. This is also great for the environment, as it repurposes an existing machine.
 
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djgamble said:
The single use case I can think of is that your OS can no longer browse the internet because nobody's making a modern web browser for it anymore.
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You’d probably be better off installing a Linux distro that isn’t filled to the brim with Google services.
 
Oh great Google throwing more crap at the wall to see what sticks and everyone who hopped on getting burned when “it” doesn’t stick (or google simply loses interest)
 
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This is great. I was working for a company in 2018 which went out of business. The IT guys had a couple hundred older laptops to decommission and employees were allowed to get them. However because of Windows licensing restrictions they put Ubuntu on them, and only the geeks among us were interested.

I think ChromeOS would have been great for this.

My only hesitation is that this is all fine and well for now, but Google could lose interest and kill this whole concept in 18-months as they do with so many projects.

killedbygoogle.com

Killed by Google

Killed by Google is the open source list of dead Google products, services, and devices. It serves as a tribute and memorial of beloved services and products killed by Google.
killedbygoogle.com killedbygoogle.com
 
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singularity0993 said:
Why not install Windows instead? Especially since this “Chrome OS Flex“ doesn’t even support Android apps or Virtual Machines.
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Not everyone wants Windows. Where I am, Chromebooks are hugely more popular than Windows PC's (and Macs) in the elementary education market, for example. Chrome OS also runs quickly on minimally-powered machines, while that is not true of Windows or Mac OS.
 
Chester Stone said:
There's no need to run macOS Monterey on older macs. Just run them on the OS with which they shipped!

For the 2015 MacBook Air 11" pictured, macOS Sierra still works wonderfully, without all the weird discolorations and permission popups.
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Sure, including the unpatched critical vulnerabilities.

/facepalm/
 
Wake up, Apple!
Still thinking it’s a good idea to premarurely obsolete perfectly-fine computers by not allowing to run current macOSes and by not issuing security updates for older macOS versions?
 
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bluespark said:
Why not? Many people have old laptops gathering dust. They are too old to run modern operating systems, but the older systems are not up-to-date on security.

And Chrome OS is useful. As one example, because of Apple's inattention to the education space over the last 5-10 years, Chromebooks have become extremely widespread, and the preferred choice for many school districts. This would let parents put Chromebooks in the hands of their children without having to buy them. This is also great for the environment, as it repurposes an existing machine.
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This!!
 
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I've been playing with CloudReady on my 2010 MacBook Air for the past few months, and it works reasonably well. So did the last version of macOS it would run (Lion from memory), and various Linux distro's I'd installed, some through rEFInd to enable multi-boot.

I can't get the ChromeOS beta to work as it appears to be missing some of the wireless drivers or configuration that's in the CloudReady version.
 
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shyam09 said:
Genuine question - if you don't do shady **** and just use it for basic tasks (like shopping from legit retailers, email, YouTube, word processing, blah blah) - do security updates really matter?
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Security updates are critical; even if you're not downloading trojans or browsing the dark web, you've vulnerable if:
  • You visit local news sites, online forums (like MacRumors), websites with recipes, etc., since all run the risk of being hijacked
  • You have IoT devices on your home network from odd vendors from around the internet (cheap smart lightbulbs from China, etc.)
  • You haven't stayed on top of your printer firmware updates, wireless router firmware updates, etc.
  • You connect to a WiFi network in public, opening yourself to man-in-the-middle attacks
 
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shyam09 said:
Genuine question - if you don't do shady **** and just use it for basic tasks (like shopping from legit retailers, email, YouTube, word processing, blah blah) - do security updates really matter?
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Even legitimate websites use ad networks that could deliver a malicious ad that exploits a browser security vulnerability.
 
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