My boys have chromebooks, it’s almost mandatory for school now, and I get why teachers need the whole class to have a similar locally-networked tool. Problem is we as parents can’t set anything, as we don’t have ‘developer’ access, and the school controls their accounts. So at home, they do stupid stuff. The hardware is ok, I wish it was just linux. About what google gets - I doubt the current data is so valuable, they play a long game hoping to lock young people into their ecosystem, to profit from people with cash/energy in their 20s.
That’s what Apple did. In the 90s Apple donated a shit ton of original iMacs to my (public but in a wealthy neighborhood) k-12 school. One computer for every three students, and there were computers set up in the library students could use before and after school - and this was during an era that if you had internet at home, a phone call would kick you off, so a lot of people used those iMacs a lot. Many of my former classmates seem to have stuck with the Apple ecosystem as adults.
