A Chromebook today is an awful lot of different things.
Sometimes, it's a simple cloud-centric laptop. Other times, it's a complex and capable computing machine. Other times yet, it's effectively an Android tablet.
One thing a Chromebook is not, however, is an especially long-term investment.
To its credit, Google's taken some significant steps toward extending the lifespan of Chrome OS devices as of late, with the typical software support window now stretched from a one-time maximum of six and a half years to a much more reasonable standard of eight years — occasionally even more. That's a big step, for sure, but the problem is that it still pales in comparison to the virtually endless software support you can get with systems running certain more traditional operating systems, such as those whose name rhymes with Schmindows.
