The original Chromecast. (credit: Google)
Rest now, little Chromecast. Google has announced the decade-old Chromecast 1 is finally hitting end of life. A message on Google’s Chromecast firmware support page (first spotted by 9to5Google) announced the wind-down of support, saying, “Support for Chromecast (1st gen) has ended, which means these devices no longer receive software or security updates, and Google does not provide technical support for them. Users may notice a degradation in performance.” The first-gen Chromecast launched in 2013 for $35.
The original Chromecast was wildly successful and sold 10 million units in 2014 alone. For years, the device was mentioned in Google earnings calls as the highlight of the company’s hardware efforts, and it was essentially the company’s first successful piece of hardware. The Chromecast made it easy to beam Internet videos to your TV at a time when that was otherwise pretty complicated.
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