I've seen a few folks here doubting that Google would actually follow through with this (which I think is a valid concern with their track record), but I'm more curious about if the hardware would hold up to 10 years of updates.
Granted, not all current Chromebooks are as low-specced as they used to be, but with the way the modern web has been gobbling up system resources the last few years I can't imagine a Chromebook actually being usable through an entire decade of bloat (whether it's technically supported via updates or not).
For the intended education market I'd hope there's pressure to keep the used software reasonably well optimized for the sorts of hardware it gets used on. But the react zealots have swindled the whole world economy into funding their madness for years, so who knows.
Not only this but my Chromebook wasn't upgradable even though the parts weren't soldered in. I tried upgrading the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth module but it wouldn't grab the latest drivers so I had to stick to the old Bluetooth that barely reaches across the room.
That's a very good point. If I look at my android experience, two major updates is the limit I would _want_ to update to. On devices where I could push the limits with lineage/cyanogenos, I could perhaps extend this to 3, being pretty apparent you're sacrificing speed for security at that point.
I hope they're going for a different track record.
ChromeOS and Google are super creepy because of how data hungry they are. That said, one of the advantages is that if they have committed to a 10 year lifecycle, and they have a new feature that is awful on an older device for performance reasons, they have an incentive to implement a feature that executes that slow function using cloud compute resources when the device is connected to maintain their lock on customers.
It really depends on how Google assesses the value prop of supporting older devices.
Granted, not all current Chromebooks are as low-specced as they used to be, but with the way the modern web has been gobbling up system resources the last few years I can't imagine a Chromebook actually being usable through an entire decade of bloat (whether it's technically supported via updates or not).