Since a lot of these are purchased by institutional buyers, it would be completely possible to mandate EOL policy by writing some legislation.
I've also wondered if a large enough school district could design it's own Chromebook to make them repairable. Having the display, chassis, logic board, disk, IO shield, keyboard/trackpad and battery be easy to disassemble. The idea being that when a machine gets damaged it's used to scavenge spare parts and rebuild complete machines.
Logic boards would most probably be updated to a newer revision over-time, and machines would silently get upgraded as they break, so you wouldn't even have to keep Chrome OS working any longer than it does now.
But this would pretty much require a California-sized district to agree to use the same model and buy them together. I don't see it happening.
I've also wondered if a large enough school district could design it's own Chromebook to make them repairable. Having the display, chassis, logic board, disk, IO shield, keyboard/trackpad and battery be easy to disassemble. The idea being that when a machine gets damaged it's used to scavenge spare parts and rebuild complete machines.
Logic boards would most probably be updated to a newer revision over-time, and machines would silently get upgraded as they break, so you wouldn't even have to keep Chrome OS working any longer than it does now.
But this would pretty much require a California-sized district to agree to use the same model and buy them together. I don't see it happening.