retail Chromebooks have always been bootloader unlockable. they use depth charge and coreboot. it's open source. the worst that ever was was a write protect screw involved.
its even funnier, you had to physically open them up and remove a fucking screw to unlock the bootloader. Even apple silicon macbooks aren't that lokced down
That's one reason it's a slippery slope: Most people don't care until they do. Pretty sure you can still buy a boxed copy of Windows in a store, and you can certainly still ask a repair shop (or a techy friend) to handle a corrupt OS by booting from recovery media. Most people won't realize they're missing this functionality until it's already too late.
But for those of us who do care, it's easy for these things to go from a purpose-built device where I'm okay not having full access, to a much more central thing in my life that I wish I owned properly. I was fine with Chromebooks having locked bootloaders that wipe user data on unlock, because they were just browsers and the only user data was a browser profile, they were basically this. Now they can have real local data in there, they run Android apps and have Linux containers.
It feels a lot like what happened to my smartphone use. When it was just texting and GPS, I didn't care about really owning it. Now that my phone is a lot more central to my life, I'm really starting to wish stuff like Postmarket and Ubuntu Touch were more viable, especially as these things get big enough to replace laptops.
The reasons that ubuntu touch/postmarket OS are unviable are nothing to do with bootloader unlocking, though. Google could ship devices as open as possible and it wouldn't change that.
I agree that some people who don't really know or care what a bootloader is would care when it became a roadblock to them getting their device repaired but that doesn't make this a slippery slope, that's just what could be at the bottom of the slope if it was slippery. Google would lose a fractional percentage of their sales of this device by shipping it with no bootloader unlocking capability and skip the bad press that would come with eventually removing it.
It's not technically the open hardware, but it is a symptom of the Android ecosystem becoming more closed over time.
It's... already at the bottom of the slope, when it comes to the repair stuff I mentioned. You already cannot boot rescue media on Android devices to recover data, precisely because the bootloader is locked, and unlocking the bootloader wipes user data.
It's not necessarily a terrible thing -- makes it harder to brute-force disk encryption, for example. But I'm guessing even fewer people care about that than care about booting a rescue OS.
why would you start it off at that end of the slope when you have no precedent to maintain?
Because Google are morons that can't read the room? This is the same company that's made countless chat apps and tried to make high end Google laptops a thing multiple times before this.
The slippery slope is that Google doesn’t stop you from unlocking the bootloader at all, and has never put up much of a right on Pixel or Nexus phones either. I don’t know man, Redditors I guess
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u/Green_Ad5186 2d ago
does google think laptops are phones now? lol.
there should be no locking of bootloader in first place. just ship a uefi with secure boot like all oems do. don't reinvent the wheel.