If they're only breaking down after three years I would consider that a stellar victory for the engineers that designed them. My kids are very careful with their gear. So they say. And yet, it develops mysterious faults, cracked screens, broken keyboards and pulled out sockets. And nothing, absolutely nothing ever happens in my presence. Weirdest thing.
Stellar victory for their IT system also: no backups, no local data, no malware, just chuck the thin client and replace, the user is back working in minutes. If you can salvage a few with light repair, great, but the labor saving is substantial.
I wouldn't blame your kids. I've had several chromebooks (that only I used) go down for various reasons including a cracked screen I could't explain.
One of my kids devices is an old Thinkpad and I don't think we'll ever be able to get rid of that.
I have a whole collection of laptops bought over the years, the ones that have seen the most use (and abuse) are a ThinkPad and a Macbook Air 13", they're both still doing fine after many years of service. They're both on extremes of the spectrum portability vs other specs, and depending on what I'm doing I'll pick the one or the other. Neither would work for me for all use cases. Zero repairs on those two.
The Thinkpad X1 Carbon and MacBook Air are likely the most resilient laptops, except for rugged models. However, there is one notable difference: the Thinkpad is water-resistant, whereas the MacBook Air is not.
Once, I inadvertently left my Thinkpad near an open window, and it was rained on overnight. The next morning, the keyboard was wet, and the touch screen was unresponsive, causing me to assume it had died. After shutting it off and leaving it in a bowl of rice for a few hours, it functioned normally again.
My X1 Carbon gen 6 (not the one I left under rain), served me more than 6 years, during which it fell maybe once every several weeks. Eventually it screen cracked after it fell from the table, it's still working with an external display.
On another occasion, I spilled some coffee on my MacBook Air's keyboard while working on a train. While most of the laptop remained operational, certain keys, including the Power button, did not function. As a result, I had to wait for the battery to run out to power off the device since the Power button was not a dedicated button but a standard keyboard key. Even with an external keyboard, I was unable to use the Power button to turn it off/reboot.
I took a laptop to school for the entire year in 1996 (year 10 at school) -- a Powerbook 190. It was a great machine, a grayscale sceen (16 grays) and a CPU with 33Mhz -> 66Mhz depending on whether it was on power, and a 500MB HD.
It went into the shop twice that year. Both times because I had tripped over the power cable. I would say I cherished it and yet as a teenager you're just not as careful with items as you should be. That PowerBook 190 was a rugged beast, and that's probably the only thing that kept it running as well as it did.
To be fair that Powerbook (I had a 160 a few years before and it costed a lot) didn't cost you (or your family) the equivalent of 200 or 300 US dollars, it was more like 2,000 (at the time, so something like 4,000 dollars today):
So, besides being really tough, you probably cared a lot about it or at least your parents told you to be careful with the thing that costed so much money (and you still managed to break it a couple times), think at how you would have treated something that was given to you by the school.
I think my parents spent about $1600AUD on it, which seems cheaper that the originally priced $2200USD. My very vague memories are that I got it in January 1996, so about 6 months after release.
I don't think, for me at least, it was the price tag so much as it was priceless. It wasn't replaceable, but your point is valid. Attitude to technology in much of the developed world is that it's disposable. We don't repair things like we used to.
The thing about young humans is that they don't yet fully understand all practical, everyday corollaries to the laws of physics.
Like, for example, it might not occur to a child that if you stack 10 textbooks on top of your backpack in your locker — where your laptop/tablet is held in a vertical pocket inside the backpack, and everything else in the backpack is just clothes or something, and so the laptop/tablet is acting as the load-bearing support for all those textbooks — then if you've got an all-plastic device, its chassis will probably flex apart and crack; or if you've got a metal-and-glass device, it'll probably buckle and bend.
Learning a basic corollary to a law of physics by breaking something usually feels really embarrassing, though — a "why didn't I expect that that would happen? I must be stupid!" kind of feeling. So kids really don't like to admit it happened.
But they really were being careful! They were trying as hard as they could! They just didn't have all the information on what they need to pay attention to to avoid breaking a thing, yet.
(And, to be clear, an opaque warning to "never do X" doesn't give them that information, because there's no backing intuition, so while they might remember it in the moment for that specific case, they won't be able to translate it to any related case. What they need is the backing intuition itself — the understanding of the causal process that makes bad things happen, such that if they imagine doing X or Y or Z, then they'll picture the causal process that applies, and so automatically infer for themselves that [unwanted consequence] will follow.)
---
Tangent, in the mode of a game designer:
There are many "practical, everyday corollaries to the laws of physics" that a child will just learn from interacting with the world. And for others, there are common "learning toys" you can buy for children that teach them certain principles.
But there are rather a lot of these physical principles that are more niche — plastic deformation under stress of seemingly-rigid bodies being one of them — where you just won't personally observe them in a regular childhood (unless your parents are nerds who like watching "historical failures of engineering" documentaries), and where it's hard for regular physical toys to model them. (A physical toy demonstrating plastic deformation would necessarily be single-use!)
Growing up myself, I (subconsciously) learned a lot about these more niche corollaries in my tween years, from playing with physics-sim computer games in my middle-school computer lab. I feel like physics-sim games were a great supplement to my ability to predict the physical world.
There are real simulational "set things up and see what happens when you press Go" sandbox 'games' that should be standard issue for every school-issued laptop/tablet, because kids can play with them and end up learning getting a feel for these principles that are hard to end up with personal experience with otherwise.
There are also real games, that actually gamify the process of developing intuitions around more specific principles. Games like Kerbal Space Program, Poly Bridge, etc. They won't teach you the math, but you'll be very ready to learn the math, far ahead of the kids who just see opaque formulae without the intuitive sense for what it's doing.
But, as far as I'm aware, there's no physics-sandbox that models plastic deformation of materials, let alone a game that gamifies the process of developing an intuition for it. (Poly Bridge might simulate stress/strain and buckling at the joints, but it won't give you any sense for the fact that a seemingly rigid body like a steel girder can end up crumpling like a wet paper bag under enough compressive stress, or pulling like taffy under enough tensile stress.)
And that's a shame. Someone should develop one. Maybe then kids would stop stacking books on their backpacks.
My daughter (11) has to constantly be reminded not to pick her laptop of by one hand, by the edge, holding it horizontally. She just doesn't "get", no matter how often I tell her, that it results in stress on the hardware and kind wind up breaking it.
I do this all the time. Out of a dozen laptops around here (Apple, Dell, Lenovo) none have broken over the years. I usually just outgrow them, or the batteries lose their ability to hold a charge.
Thinking about this, I realize that all of my laptops fall into four categories: (1) MacBooks ——these are made of metal and are quite rigid and strong, (2) large screened Dells, too heavy to pick up comfortably with one hand, (3) Lenovo Thinkpads that are thin but very lightweight, and (4) a couple of Chromebooks that sit permanently on a desk for web use only and don’t get picked up. In all of these cases, there is little danger that I will injure them by handling them as you’ve described.
I had an HP laptop provided by work that bent when picked up by the edge, such that four pads on the bottom no longer contacted and it had a tilt. I personally believe this should not happen, even if it costs an ounce.
The white plastic iBooks, especially the G3s, were incredibly prone to damage this way. I think I went through three G3s (on warranty) before they replaced it with a G4, and then swapped out a busted G4 still on the original warranty. Never occurred to me to change how I was using the system; it was clearly a design defect that was on them to handle. And none of the metal laptops ever gave me problems, although the TiBook certainly felt a bit fragile due to its size.
That's really not on her though, or her understanding of physics but simply that the designers of this stuff should have foreseen that this is exactly how people will handle the gear, just like a book. If you can grab it by something you should be able to lift it. It's not as though you're trying to lift a car by a mirror.
> If you can grab it by something you should be able to lift it.
I disagree with this completely. I can pick a reasonable sized mirror up by the edge, and it has a chance of breaking. I can pick a table up by one of four legs, but it puts stress on the connections. I can pick lots of things up in ways that would do damage to them. And the people that made them _could_ make them stronger to avoid that, at the cost of a higher price. Or they could not spend the money and just say "don't pick it up in a way that puts unreasonable stress on it". It is a compromise and, for many items, there is a point beyond which it's not worth spending more money on it.
It really is just unfortunate how squishy LCDs are but it's not like laying sheets of digitizer glass across the same screen makes them particularly more durable.
It's almost hard to imagine how many laptops break in that exact same stop near the top center of the screen from being picked up like that.
Maybe I'm buying more sturdy laptops than your daughter gets, but I've never broken anything by doing that, and I have laptops well over 10 years old, and have been doing that for some 25 years.
I understand the theory, but I think significantly more laptops are broken by e.g. squishing them against a non-flat object in a bag, or dropping.
Think of a modern tablet. Would you seriously say one must not hold a tablet by an edge?
(Me personally, I destroy all my laptop hardware by spilled drinks...)
I've never knocked a computer off the edge of a table because it was left with part of it extending beyond the edge. But leaving it like that does make increase the risk of that happening. The same idea is true of picking it up by the edge; it increases stress on the hardware, which can cause damage. The fact that it hasn't happened to you just means it's isn't _sure_ to cause a problem.
My daughter (11) has to constantly be reminded not to pick her laptop of by one hand, by the edge, holding it horizontally.
Back when day trading was a thing and Starbucks was packed with people on laptops, I used to see people pick up their computers by the top of the screen all the time. I never understood that.
I couldn't learn that either when my laptop weighed 3.5kg. Even the feeling of my wrist getting nearly twisted out of socket couldn't teach me anything.
You also have to run around school carrying tons of stuff all day, or at least I did. My 2006 MacBook's HDD died when I was running to English class with my backpack on and fell down a short flight of stairs.
These are descended from laptops and 20 years ago laptops had already perfected the engineering for a two-year target lifetime.
The further back you go, portables were still mainly business machines not expected to be affordable to most students, and businesses really didn't want to send their people out with more than a two-year-old laptop or wearing a suit much older either.
And a new Windows version was coming out every 2 years.
Our kids' experience with public school Chromebooks has been pretty much the opposite of the comments here. All the neighborhood kids I've seen are taking good care of the school Chromebooks they have been entrusted with - they understand how to be responsible for them. Our schools taught basic typing at an early age, so the kids can fire up Google Docs and start writing as fast as they can think. For science class, they can open a spreadsheet, record data and immediately make charts and graphs. Not to mention, in almost any future profession, spreadsheet skills are a must. During Covid they could Zoom with their teachers and classmates. From what I've seen, their Chromebooks have been a tool that enables them to do their best academic and creative work. And they do all this without any trouble from viruses or malware. $200 for 3 years is extremely reasonable given all the benefits the kids are receiving.
Yeah, that’s less than the cost of one hardcover textbook, or a few softcover workbooks. The per-student per-year acquisition cost involved is, on the scale of school expenses, hardly worth talking about.
Not sure how it is in the US, where I went to school I had to deal with textbooks that where up to 30 years old and showed it. The acquisition cost for school books was basically zero since they didn't buy replacements until the books literally fell apart in the hands of a student and students had to pay for anything they "broke".
I definitely had classmates finding their parents' names inside the front covers of their books in the old checkout list. This was in suburban Denver in the early 2000s, so it's not like it was some backwater town a long time ago.
I don’t think he was comparing to the yearly cost of textbooks but more comparing it relative to a single textbook (which students have multiple). The key is cost per student for their most critical piece of equipment, and one far more capable than a 30yr old textbook, $66 isn’t bad at all.
Laptops are rarely something used in schools during lectures but rather something used for homework, video calls, and research.
Bill Gates has long called for reversing schools to be for group learning and researching (aka homework) while in school with teachers helping them while they spend time at home reading or watching lectures. Laptops would obviously be well suited for that role.
Even without such a scenario equalizing the access to tech for after school schooling is essential in addition to interactive sessions while at school.
So I don't have a good answer RE real life but at a minimum it should be the basic level of investment
My 2.5 year old has seen me cutting and shaping bits of wood and metal to make stuff, and occasionally brings me Lego bits and says "Dada cut this!" because he wants a funny-shaped block for something.
He's learned an important lesson. Things in the world can be constructed, things in the world can be destroyed, and all of it - including the world itself - can be *modified*...
When I was a kid I'd paint my bricks the right color if I didn't have enough of the ones I needed or if Lego had decided that bricks in a certain color shouldn't exist. Like green. Which they eventually made of course but when I was a kid those didn't exist at all.
At 2.5 years old that's a great attitude to have, that's one that'll go places :)
My child can manage to break legos. Yet, when I, an adult man, steps on one in the middle of the night it is somehow I who “breaks.” Very odd how these things happen.
Give a TED Talk, go on 60 Minutes, and then change the subject until the world moves on.
> “I have to some degree underestimated the difference between shaking the hand of a head of state and having a check written,” Negroponte finally admitted. “And yes, it has been a disappointment.”
Netbooks and Chromebooks were inspired by OLPC and may not have happened without it. OLPC really hurt themselves by not selling to individuals or schools.
Quite well remember them and the Give 1 Get 1 program. Mine still boots and I still love being able to use it outside with bright sunlight.
I believe (but could be wrong) it was Richard Smith of the project who made the comment (paraphrased) "perhaps the warranty should be void until you've the XO-1."
I last booted mine a week ago in anticipation of summer.
I have one sitting in my basement. It’s a neat device - but not particularly useful. As a former teacher, it’s clearly a theory-first educational device.
It's amazing how far we're come in 15 years. Rewind to 2008 when Chrome was launched:
- Netbooks were hopelessly underpowered for the only game in town, Windows. Now it's possible to run a whole classroom on hardware that's even less expensive (even before adjusting for inflation).
- Microsoft's Internet Explorer team had been disbanded for years, and Apple had abandoned its pursuit of the web for iPhone apps, launching the App Store instead. Today, the open web includes enough platform functionality to implement full-fledged word-processing, drawing, painting, and finance applications.
- Unpatched desktop machines were the norm, and antivirus subscriptions were the band-aid response among the relatively conscientious. Now an eight-year automatic update policy (plus more via Chrome OS Flex) is viewed as a liability.
- Laptop repairs were an expensive ordeal. Actually, that hasn't changed much. But it's interesting how this article portrays a $90 Chromebook repair as a negative because the device was inexpensive to begin with. Some of these devices cost less than the retail price of a Windows 11 license key!
It's worth checking that out too, it has a few additional details.
I wonder how these compared to iPads on those same metrics? My kid's schools switched from iPads to Chromebooks. Seemed like The Chromebooks are way better for the work they have.
Having worked in IT at a school in my early days, you couldn't convince people that iPad's weren't the way to go in a Windows ecosystem.
They're great if they're used for taking notes and using web based services. But if they need to start accessing network drives or school applications they're often not that great.
I think schools need to just give parents $1000 and have them buy and maintain and insure devices directly.
My county school system bought a bunch of crappy Lenovos three years ago and now they are really bad. Disk failures. Battery lasts an hour so students have to constantly charge all day (20 kids running cables every 55 minutes).
And they have lots of weird systems and sites that are hard coded to only run on these laptops.
And the school doesn’t have people to maintain or debug or patch so it’s a weird situation where 5th graders are supposed to call tech support in the middle of a school day to figure out why something is working.
And it has weird policies where if your laptop was stolen you had to reimburse the county the purchase price. So if your Lenovo that you could probably eBay for $100 was stolen you had to pay $1299 or something strange. The first repair was free, the second $100, the third $300. And since no one understood computers they would make rulings that any damage was caused by the student (a 10 year old).
After about a year, I noped out and just bought a MacBook Air for $800 with AppleCare ($80/year) to insure against damage or theft. This works well except for the times when they have special web sites that only work on the Lenovo.
I consider myself pretty tech savvy, but I think school was better with everything on paper. But at least we didn’t buy chromebooks.
I feel like all of these problems would be resolved if the school had just bought Chromebooks. It's cheaper for the district to treat $200 Chromebooks as disposables than it is to get a MacBook air for $800 with $80/year AppleCare for a decade. Not to mention ridiculously simpler for the school to manage from a software and support side.
The company I'm at does a ton in network refreshes in the education space from E-Rate (government funding) for K-12 to ritzy universities. I've seen everything from Windows devices to iPads to Chromebooks to Android tablets to MacBooks and the schools using Chromebooks for assigned devices as throwaways always have the least trouble.
I mean I cannot quantify it exactly, but I just know in the mid sized town that I grew up in, my mother worked at a middle school and later an elementary school, and I briefly worked at the middle school. In a class of probably 200 kids, I would say 40 or so kids had active drug users as parents maybe 15 were meth, 15 crack/coke, and the remainder a smattering of other substances.
Also a lot of parents with gang involvement. One kids house got riddled with automatic gunfire in the middle of the night as part of a gang retaliation. :/ kid was fine but, damn. The situation here in certain places in the USA is truly dire.
There is just no way that 7% of parents in the US are using meth, or even 10% are using drugs (outside of alcohol, tobacco, weed). There just is no way that is accurate at all.
I didn't say that. I said that at the school that I worked at, those are the rough numbers. While this is not the norm, it is not unusual in rural American schools.'
The national average, however, is obviously not close at all. There are probably many entire districts where the number is 0
Text books are physically expensive and difficult to manage. A tablet or laptop, in theory, can reduce those costs to that of IP (if any). Even my kindergartner sometimes has to take home a bag full of books, the bag would be much lighter if it was just an iPad (which they also have, but don’t use for library books).
> Text books are physically expensive and difficult to manage. A tablet or laptop, in theory, can reduce those costs to that of IP (if any).
Plus the cost of the laptop or tablet of course.
I don't see how it's cheaper or easier; at my high school some classes used books that were over 20 years old; that was fine because the basics of things like science or language doesn't change that fast; f=ma is still f=ma, a verb is still a verb, etc. A laptop will last what, 3 or 4 years, at best?
Books require some maintenance and management, but it was one janitor doing it for all of the school, alongside his other duties. It's a job many could learn in a few weeks.
Maintaining laptops or tablets seems significantly harder and more expensive. We had several hundred students; that's probably at least one or two full-time high-knowledge employees instead of one part-time relatively low-knowledge worker.
The problem is managing those books, lockers kind of suck, Americans change classes rather than teachers, so you got to lug them around somehow. A lot of schools simply dump the problem on the student.
An iPad is pretty easy to maintain, and just a kid proof case around it, is pretty durable. The software to manage those iPads is pretty well developed as well.
The draconian (and probably most effective) approach would be legal measures, but the perception there is almost certainly why schools end up making the calls on behalf of parents (which I think is your point).
Yeah, I'm guessing (as not a lawyer) that it's too hard to extract $1000 from someone if they're broke and already spent it. Some govt agencies have their ways, but I don't think schools do, which is maybe why nothing financial is entrusted to the parents.
Quite unfortunate, but I’m not surprised sub-$200 don’t last terribly long. Especially with the kind of treatment they’re likely to get from school kids.
Even if they’re just as hard to repair, a more expensive and more ruggedized model might have been a better choice. If such a thing exists, which I kind of doubt.
I know for sure Lenovo and Dell have more ruggedized Chromebooks just for schools. The one my kid has was a Dell that had an metal frame. The Lenovo 11e (iirc) was also mostly metal and quite rugged.
True, but I think some of the demise of them is down to bad design.
My partner is a tech at a first school here in the UK, and they have Chromebooks - pretty much one per child.
Most of them have needed to be put back together because the hinge attachment to the case is not strong enough. The screws are not well fitted from the factory, and as soon as it comes loose, the mounting can get damaged because where the brass inserts are set in the plastic is pretty flimsy, and will crack. So they end up with a chromebook which can be 'kind of' repaired if you put the screws back in really tight, but it's only so long that it will last as that area has no real strength to it.
If this part of these was made better (these are Asus C201, but there are others that are similar), then they would never have been a problem aside from the obvious actual abuse that about 10% of them get from children who have behavioural issues.
Others mentioned here (such as Dell) are better, but have other issues - the Dell ones have glass in front of the screens, which can break, and leaves razor-sharp splinters when it does. It's also a nightmare to replace as parts are difficult to get (we had to order them from the US, and paid quite a bit for each one), and they are macbook-like in the difficulty of repair here.
Making these much stronger (like many times stronger) would not have cost a lot. They just skimped on plastic in a few places, leading them to be weak in the field. Another £1 spent per unit would have meant almost none of them would have suffered this. The later model (C202) were better, but still broke in the same place, with the same failure mode for the most part.
Not a good source of input, but I've had a Chromebook for the last ~8 years that has no cracks or broken anything. I've only had to replace the SSD once in the entire time it's been running near 24/7 as a home server and auxillary PC with GalliumOS.
Then again, it stays on a shelf, but it hasn't had any mystery developments in play. Maybe the screen has washed out a little but that's it.
Given a choice between $200 for two years or $1,000 for ten years I would actually choose the disposable one because a ten-year-old laptop may become obsolete even if it's still working.
I recall a sales gig from Google demoing Chromebooks and part of his dog and pony show was tossing it to the ground. It was an attempt to impress disposability. They’re so cheap you don’t have to care if they break. I got the opposite impression. Why would I buy a piece of trash?
Contrast that with a decade later and this attitude of disposability is a no-go. But they were selling that as an advantage.
I knew some middle school students who would place their school-issued chromebooks upside-down on linoleum and slide around on them. So no surprise here.
Fully supportive of such initiatives to make spare parts available directly or indirectly. Hopefully we see companies release designs after EOL/EOS dates that allow 3D printing (where feasible) in time. I've managed to extend the life of products (primarily my coffee grinder) by finding 3d printing designs online.
The notion of 3D printing a replacement for a cracked plastic laptop case isn't very realistic for most consumers or school districts. If we want these devices to last longer then they will have to be designed for robustness, which will make them heavier and more expensive.
> Although every school in my county has a few 3d printers, so some schools could print directly.
Shared 3D printers almost always produce poor quality, inaccurate prints. Never mind maintenance, using them requires skill. Skill which teachers usually lack, and schoolchildren obviously lack.
They're still useful devices, but I wouldn't expect such prints to be strong enough and accurate enough to do the job.
>“These high costs may make schools reconsider Chromebooks as a cost-saving strategy,” the report reads.
Efficiency always has a cost, whether that's quality, reliability, sustainability, externalized waste, or whatever. Either you're honest about those costs and acknowledge that the bill will come due later, or you're living in magic land.
We crave luxury, convenience, decadence, and status, with our sole concern being how inexpensively we can attain them. Is anyone still naïve enough to believe that money is the only cost?
This mindset is likely a significant contributor to climate change and numerous other global issues. A fundamental shift in values is desperately needed. We could consume less meat without sacrificing affordability, invest in reusable technology without breaking the bank, and make similar choices regarding cars. We opt for plastic simply because it's marginally cheaper than glass and metal, and we prefer frying pans with PFAs to save a mere 15 seconds of cleaning time. We shun nuclear energy like Molten Salt Reactors due to the inconvenience of waste handling, despite its relatively short duration of 300 years compared to the thousands of years it will take to restore atmospheric carbon levels. We buy clothing and blood diamonds from brands known for child labor, slavery, and bloodshed because they convey status.
Have we stopped buying everything Nestle makes for us despite so much of their vehemently unethical behaviour? Was cheating emissions software not enough for us to stop buying VW cars? How many Foxconn suicides does it take for you to reconsider an iPhone? How many more wars on drugs will we wage before we stop paying pharma bros for OxyCotin? Are there no alternative companies to Bayer to buy from or was knowingly infecting Africans with HIV not a big enough violation of trust in a medical company? Surely if Tesla produced only my car, their brutal lithium mining using children and disposal scandal wouldn't be a big deal.
The blame lies with us. As consumers, we consistently make decisions that go against our best interests in terms of health, finances, and the future of our children. Industries only cater to the demands we create. It is nothing short of absurd to believe that manufacturers would continue to supply unrepairable technology or products that harm us if we simply refused to buy them.
I concur, but in retrospect, the curriculum even twenty years ago was learning locked-down pieces of software in a locked down environment. The usual "ICT" consisting of using Windows and learning the absolute basics of Word, Excel, and Publisher. Maybe they'd let you go on Google for 30 minutes once a month via Internet Explorer.
Anybody who has more than a passing interest will go "but what about x?", e.g., "how do they make games then?" or "how do they make movies then?" or "how do I write an app then?". Most kids weren't and still aren't interested, but the ones who are, will beg, steal, borrow or buy yesteryear junk to fiddle with.
ChromeOS supports various kinds of Linux apps. Including normal desktop & cli apps in the Crostini developer oriented environment, and Android apps out of the box.
I like my chromebook as a cheap, portable remote desktop client to a more powerful windows machine - and for watching youtube on the device itself. But what dies faster than any component, in my experience, is the emmc module. My understanding is the larger the size the more life it will have due to wear leveling. Ive found its hard to find a decently price chromebook that has replaceable ssds (m2 etc). The selection is really slim. This is one thing I wish could change.
Just add why they're so handy. For $199 i got
*14 inch anti-glare IPS display
*fanless, battery life 3-7 hours
*RDP (thru ssh tunnel) into a beefy windows desktop or laptop *you have IMO the best windows experience on a laptop.
can easily bring a compact external battery it charge it up over usb c. never have to worry about finding a power outlet or running out of battery
you can buy a celeron no-name/Chinese brand ultrabook for like 250 bucks, and that generally comes with a minimum of 8gb of ram and an M2 slot. Chuwi is one example.
I'm not sure that the value-add for Chromebooks as personal machines is still there at that point, at least personally. For me 50 dollars is worth the freedom of operating system/double the ram/ddr5/3:2/decent resolution/m2 interface/separation from Google.
Right. This says nothing about "Chromebooks" per se; more "all computer and computer-like" devices. The planned obsolescence for all of them is pretty appalling.
I say this as someone who runs a non-profit which includes at times grabbing old computers from institutions and trying to repurpose them for others. The number of available computers FAR FAR FAR outpaces the time, labor, and even possible recipients. It's ridiculous how we throw these things away.
Why does a kid need a chrome book? To do what? Pencils and paper, what's wrong with that? It worked for centuries and now for some reason every student needs a chrome book to waste tax payer money, useless tech, theater for the parents that their children will have some kind of an advantage. Schools need to go back to the basics and not invent ways to make kids stupid and waste tax payer money.
Burning wood? Luxury! Growing up we had to inscribe our cuneiform on clay tablets. And it really was the best way, because our tablets would last thousands of years.
I think there's some theoretical utility to the concept, but the problem seems to be that the software is so bad kids would actually be better off with pencil and paper and old-timey physical textbooks. 99% of modern consumer software is godawful and kids seem to get the worst of it, presumably because the people who are actually subject to using the software (kids, parents, to some degree teachers) are so many steps removed from the """decision"""-makers who bought it, to say nothing of the rent-seeking ghouls who """designed""" and """built""" it.
FWIW my primary device is a Chromebook and it's quite sturdy. I've thrown it, stepped on it, spilled water on it, abused it in every way you can imagine, and it's fine (minus the paint etc.). 3 years in the hands of children seems very reasonable considering the cheap price point.
3 years for a $200 device seems like a pretty good deal. Especially in the hands of kids who are rarely careful with things.
It's obviously terrible for the environment and it's also probably terrible for cognitive development. Pen and paper is a way better solution for kids and teenagers.
Honestly, for adults too, pen and paper is often a better solution. Word processing and number crunching are the main use cases for a computer and I think kids should learn these things with a computer, but it would be so much better if they had direct instruction in a computer lab rather than giving them all a distracting laptop/chromebook.
Three years is about the lifetime of a laptop. The real story here is how kids are being forced to use Google Drive. Google now has a lock on whatever is left of personal computing (managing files) which will last a generation.
> For example, researchers found that nearly half of the replacement keyboards listed for Acer Chromebooks were out of stock online and that over a third cost “$89.99 or more, which is nearly half the cost of a typical $200 Chromebook.” Some IT departments, PIRG reports, have resorted to buying extra batches of Chromebooks just for their components.
It costs a lot more than this to replace a MacBook keyboard. Idk about other laptops. Seems the only thing uniquely bad about Chromebooks is the limited software updates.
This is a great thread to ask a semi-related question: I have an 2012/2013 Samsung ARM Chromebook (silver, looks like a MacBook knockoff). Google dropped support for it a few years ago - is there any modern Linux distribution available for these things? That thing is still in almost mint condition, and battery still holds over an hour charge despite being 10 years old (and in serious use for its first 3 years, light use for a few more).
Remember when Apple basically gave away computers to schools during 80/90s? I feel it created a long-term positive impact for the company down the road.
BBC Micros in the UK would be the in-school equivalent of this (although I don't believe they were given away), and the ZX Spectrum the home equivalent.
The fact that they couldn't do very much unless you learned to program them was a distinct advantage compared to the PCs that followed - which were used to teach Microsoft Office, not computing - and is why Silicon Valley is packed full of mid-30s-40s Brits.
The key things with these devices was the accessibility and the ability to "get under the covers" and use it.
It wasn't a device to delivery courses, it was a tool - just as much as a hammer in shop class was a tool. Yea, we all played Oregon trail... but I've still got fond memories of Rocky's Boots ( https://archive.org/details/Rockys_Boots_1982_Learning_Compa... ).
Chromebooks and smart phones (I believe) are too far away from the computing of the device.
With the Apple ][+ I recall wanting to make a program that showed maps of the world in low rez graphics... and the corresponding learning more about loops than the librarian understood and using the DATA block along with READ to read it and learning how to compress 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1 into 255.
There are a couple things going on though with the expectations. I could write a program that would look amateur but comparable to what was professional at that time using BASIC. The web of old that we fondly look back to with Myspace didn't take masterful skills to get to what was similarly acceptable.
Today, to get something that is vaguely comparable to what you expect when you use a computing device takes a lot of work. Swift Playgrounds and Scratch aren't enough. There is a high discouragement factor and the expectations of what someone who wants to do what I did with BASIC or simple web pages back then is a lot of work.
I would be tempted to say that instead of general computing and scratch we should look at teaching kids Excel... and I might get some flack for that. The main thing is that with Excel you look at what can be done and it's not too far from making a column have the values of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16. You can get something that is useful without too much work and without expecting it to look as nice as a fancy page or game. And as they learn how to do more, you can introduce them to =LAMBDA.
The main use of computers in school should be teaching typing, word processing (and it probably should be with Word), number crunching and mathematics, and perhaps a little bit of graphics processing.
I agree that Excel should be taught, but also something like Mathematica (or some other CAS, rather than forcing TI calculators on kids). Python, perhaps through Jupyter Notebooks, would also probably be good too.
> The PIRG report squares with the drum I’ve been banging in reviews of “eco” laptops for years: the most eco-friendly gadgets, by far, are gadgets that last.
Surprising absolutely no one but the people who are eternally shocked to learn that free lunches don’t exist. Which is extra ironic considering schools provide lunches that are “free” to the student but are also gross and cost someone else money.
School lunch programs in the US are captive to the ag department, which is why they are gross. It’s a dumping ground for whatever commodity domestic goods are the most plentiful.
Layers upon layers of perverse incentives. It’s not just taxpayers that pay, it’s also the kids and the environment and thus future generations.
Some people have been trying to get this changed for a long time now. No luck so far.
Sub-200 device doesn't sound so bad if you look at lifetime cost. If on average they last 2 years. It is still better than 800 device that is replaced in 4 years. Or 6 years...
And my guess is that these are heavily abused and the more expensive wouldn't on average survive substantially longer.
I wonder how many of these are the Arm-based Chromebooks? Do those have similar problems with software updates to Android devices, because they're at the mercy of SoC vendors to provide updated drivers?
Chromebooks don't really have that type of problem because they only have specific motherboards and the updates come from google
They're much better than android devices in that sense
They have a fixed date where they stop receiving updates (eight years from when the model is released) but they are guaranteed to receive updates until then
And then after a few years the updates stop coming from Google and you can't even use it to watch streaming because the Chrome version number is too low. I will never buy another Chromebox or Chromebook again for this reason.
I've got perfectly functioning devices that can't do anything because of this.
It's eight years from when the model is released so as long as you pay attention and don't buy a model that's already old at the time you buy it it's not too bad.
On many devices you can unlock the bootloader and install a third party chromeos distribution (or linux) after that if you really want, too
8 years is MUCH better than basically all android devices although it's probably worse than windows on a normal laptop, and you're guaranteed updates during that period
The browser is in the process of being decoupled from the os version (it's in beta right now and you can opt in I think) so in the future even if you stop getting updates you'll be able to update the browser to fix the problem you're describing ("you can't even use it to watch streaming because the Chrome version number is too low").
If your chrome os devices are just past their lifetime and have enough storage, you may be able to opt into that and keep using them now actually
I think in the case of schools, 8 years is probably longer than they would expect to keep using laptops anyway.
>And then after a few years the updates stop coming from Google
yes, but that's part of the deal when you buy the things. it's frustrating as an individual user, but for large purchasers like schools it's a selling point to have guaranteed software and firmware updates going to a known date that you can trust. they'll be implementing a device purchase plan with a fixed lifespan anyways, so as long as they know the EOL is later than their end date, it's fine.
and fwiw, my old chromebook that's been EOL for four years still seems to be working fine. it's slow AF, but it works.
sure they cost more but you can upgrade them en masse and replace components and screens. dunno how the math works out for cost savings vs cheap disposable devices but at least you'll have less E-waste.
Often it feels like government especially education contracts for technology are designed to enrich people, rather than buy what is best for education.
Government contracting over time acquires more and more rules reacting to scandals which are designed to prevent that, which has the unintended effect that government contracting is so complex that it goes entirely to firms–or organizations within firms–whose core competency is navigating (and manipulating) the result bureaucratic maze, not delivering quality goods and services (not uncommonly, the actual goods and services are subcontracted out), whereas the contract managers on the government side are pretty much fully occupied with the trees of bureaucratic minutiae so as not to be able to see (and generally being sharply limited in what they could do even if they did see) the overall cost/value situation.
The problem with bureaucracies is that even if someone did see the bigger picture, no one person is able to change the system to get desirable results.
Maybe one or two people could, but they didn't get to that position by rocking the boat.
I think it's just that government spending, especially in taxpayer facing environments, is under extreme scrutiny.
So you have companies trying to make it look like they're offering the most, but costing the least, and hiding those costs elsewhere (planned obsolescence)
Is it really 'planned' in this case? I think 'expected' is a better term, it's not really avoidable that a $200 laptop is not going survive being used by children for very long.
My wife uses Vista era laptop, from 2007. Still works great at 2023, changed it to have SSD disk and 8 GB RAM, running newest Linux Mint.
Newest Windows, macOS and ChromeOS only works on newest devices. After that, just install Linux. For example, 2 weeks ago I installed Debian 11 to Chromebook https://github.com/xet7/chromebook
Mac and Windows laptops will probably run the latest OS for more than 8 years. Still, I don't see why a school should buy a more than 1yo Chromebook, so that leaves 7 years of support, which is fine. Most likely dies from 2% milk before then.
