Chromebooks are nothing but junk thin clients Schools need to invest in real laptops on a rolling maintenance and replacement schedule
Chromebooks are just budget-spec laptops. Hardware-wise, they ought to be fine for anything a K-12 student needs to do on a day-to-day basis (and for anything they can’t do on it, it’s probably a good teaching point for them to learn how to use a server or VM or cloud instance).
This is a business decision on Google’s part because they sold the machines at low or negative profit in order to build what they thought would be an ongoing revenue stream for them, which has not seemed to materialize.
OTOH, the real questions should not be aimed at Google, as much as it was local schools who signed the contracts with them without considering the e-waste and other downstream effects of what they were signing up for. That’s the sort of thing that I think needs to be factored into municipal and corporate purchasing: it’s all focused on the immediate spend, not on the long-term cost (and in the case especially of a municipality, that should be the cost to the community at large).
But hey… I bet a lot of them are going to turn up on eBay. As in the 90s when corporations were turning over hardware every 18-24 months, someone else’s poor decisionmaking can be a great subsidy for hobbyists. Not good for the planet, though.
I want to get my kid a new Chromebook, but the naming convention is super fucked
I have no idea if one I’m looking at is the same as the one I bought, 1 year newer, last year, even older, who the fuck knows
2 core CPU before, 4 slower cores, 4 faster cores of a different architecture/company…
Why can’t it just be like anything else. Thinkpad 420. Next year, 430. Next year, 440. Cool, but Chromebooks are a pain in the ass
It’s astonishing how much time and money my school must have spent on repairing, replacing, and performing software/IT maintenance on these piece of shit computers instead of just using brands that work.
Back in 2008 my school were throwing away about 200 workstations, with monitors. We asked if we could buy some, but they told us no; they were being donated to a charity which ships them to Uganda.
I’m hoping these Chromebooks aren’t “recycled” but instead have a similar fate as those desktops from my school. I’m in Indonesia right now and could give away thousands of Chromebooks in a heartbeat.
Eh, how so, you can just install Linux on them last I heard.
Why would you just throw out something you can put an up to date OS on?
Yeah, but you cant expect your average teacher to know how to install or use Linux.
Really they should be selling them on or donating them to people in need?
They don’t need to have the teachers to install Linux (though that’d be welcome to do as part of classes). Just hand them over to a reputable IT that will get them ready and going with a good distro.
Please Teachers are some of the most highly educated dumb people we have During the COVID Remote Learning they didn’t even know what streaming was much less were competent enough to do it Their students know more about streaming and how to broadcast a stream A greatly wasted resource The Smart Board my district has in every classroom are capable and setup for remote learning then sat there unused