Chromebooks winning in schools, Windows and Apple fight back
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Then a local teacher intervened and said, no, no, no, get Chromebooks. We did. We got six for the same money. They're compatible with the local school IT systems. They reset themselves when somebody logs off, so we don't have to worry about what the kids install on them.
THEY HAVE KEYBOARDS! Kids can use them to for written-word assignments without futzing around with the onscreen keyboards.
They aren't quite as game-focused as the iPads. That means we get less squabbling over who gets to use them and for what. (I've taken to leaving my iPad at home because it's an attractive nuisance.)
They're cheap enough that it's not the end of the world if one gets damaged.
The chromebooks are a big win for us and the kids we serve.
I guess if you don't count Gmail, Search, Android, Drive, Photos, etc, Google's record is pretty bad.
Google canceled a whole bunch of things, some of which a lot of people used. Now a lot of people are perhaps rightfully sceptical about all their products, if that product is not part of their core.
They still have quite a lot of stuff though.
I'd also like them to have a clear and unambiguous strategy so I can cleanly move from one product to the next when they do phase out a product.
But, "people in Hell want ice water," as they say.
Found the Ars Technica Battlefront veteran.
Can be used on recycled laptops. Provides Chromeos. Free for personal (no support). I have no connection with neverware other than being impressed with their work when I tried it on a 9 year old Thinkpad.
> Then a local teacher intervened and said, no, no, no, get Chromebooks. We did. We got six for the same money. They're compatible with the local school IT systems. They reset themselves when somebody logs off, so we don't have to worry about what the kids install on them.
> THEY HAVE KEYBOARDS! Kids can use them to for written-word assignments without futzing around with the onscreen keyboards.
> They aren't quite as game-focused as the iPads. That means we get less squabbling over who gets to use them and for what. (I've taken to leaving my iPad at home because it's an attractive nuisance.)
> They're cheap enough that it's not the end of the world if one gets damaged.
> The chromebooks are a big win for us and the kids we serve.
How did you only get six Chromebooks for the price of four iPads?
By avoiding the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel ones that might not stand up to a classroom environment?
The Asus Chromebook Flip C302 and Samsung Chromebook Plus are $449, for example.
When I needed more, I could RDP, or SSH to something bigger... was nice light/small machine to have with me to stay connected. As it is, my current (2014 rmbp) sits mostly in the bag and rarely goes with me. My work issued one is tethered to the desk. Wouldn't mind a machine I care a little less about losing to have with me, or keep in the car even.
Also, how is the feel of the touchpad? I'm guessing newer builds/kernels should support docker now.
The youngest kids still should get tablets though (if anything.)
Just pointing out that it's still a matter of what's appropriate for a particular classroom, never one size fits all.
Input onto a tablet is clumsy at best. It is essentially a passive device. Yes, you can add an aftermarket keyboard and and an after market stand, but now you have a three part hacked together netbook instead of one that's designed with a keyboard and hinge from the get-go.
Further, tablets are a magnet for damage. A laptop screen can take localized damage and still mostly work. A tabket screen shatters. Plus the laptop screen is set back within the monitor component and the overall center of gravity means that a netbook is more likely to land on the keyboard side.
Finally, the software story is best for windows (web and native plus great management features), decent for chromebook, and worst for ipads.
I've seen some creative types using drawing applications on it, which is cool I guess, but for the most part I don't see it replacing a laptop/desktop just yet.
So I almost always travel with a laptop-like thing (whether a Mac or a Chromebook) and a tablet-like thing (whether an iPad or a Kindle). Frankly, devices are small and light enough today that there just isn't a huge win to paring down to one device that doesn't do some tasks well.
I'm not going to try to make a argument for Android tablets in general (on my third, not buying a fourth), but they actually support all this.
Run up a chroot with Debian and X11 and you can even have yourself a semi-normal Linux desktop inside your Android. With a mouse and keyboard.
It's not great, but when cornered I've actually managed to pull through on a device like this.
At the point you're using X11 on Android, wouldn't you be better off with a Chromebook?
I'm also interested in Samsung's DeX. We're well past the point where I should be able to carry one device in my pocket and dock into extra peripherals as needed.
Sidenote: of course we couldn't have a standard for dockable devices. So we've got Microsoft's Continuum, Samsung's DeX and whatever MaruOS is doing these days.
> Run up a chroot with Debian and X11 and you can even have yourself a semi-normal Linux desktop inside your Android. With a mouse and keyboard.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge a Linux fan, but calling this "supported" seems like a stretch. Maybe better phrasing would be "this is possible on an Android tablet".
Similarly with keyboards: ctrl-c, x and v work just as you expect. As does alt-tab.
This is very different from the iOS story, so just to play on the differences, I was just showing to what extent a Android-tablet can be taken if the need arises. I didn't mean to hint X11 and chroots were officially supported by Google or any vendor.
Deep down Android was clearly built to be a general purposey OS.
Too bad they botched the tablet-story.
> My problem was the lack of multi-tasking…
The current iOS does this pretty well. http://www.imore.com/ipad-multitasking
> …and no mouse support.
Okay, now this is more of a stretch. :O) BUT, with a Lighting to USB adapter you can (technically) use both USB mice, and wireless mice that use USB dongles.
The closest thing is the X1 Mouse and that only works on Citrix.[0]
Ethernet yes, keyboard yes, mouse, no.
[0] https://www.citrix.com/products/citrix-mouse/support.html
physical input of symbols can be done, but I like clicky keys.
I'm pretty convinced that the motivations for providing iPads or laptops for each student are almost entirely political and not educational.
Was it some kind of ebook? Is that what you mean?
I have OSX in a VM just for Safari issues.
How a school, and vendor, get away with requiring flash in 2017 is beyond frustrating.
This madness must stop, but field-tested textbooks are a lot of work. And a lot of $$. Good luck.
My grandma couldn't do more than automatically playing DVD on her windows desktop.
My wife can't do more than opening and closing the door on any random semi-truck.
I can't do more than make horrible sounds on a violin.
All of these are only half of the story, and the receiver of the message is supposed to guess the other half perhaps ? But of course, which is the other half ? Is there a point to be made about any of these or is it just a random observation ?
Basically it brings more questions that it answers.
Outside of school, I've done a little bit of artwork on it, and it's nice. But that's about it. My daughter draws prolifically, has a Surface and, after trying my iPad for awhile, decided she didn't want me to buy her one of her own.
For myself, the most useful device I can imagine is the MacBook Pro that, by the way, you can remove the screen and draw on it. But I don't want iOS and a cobbled on Bluetooth keyboard. And I'm not holding my breath.
For about $400 (total - iPad + Casio, some wires and software), you can use one to build a portable rig that actually sounds decent (if only I knew how to play better...). Use a "camera kit" (USB hub) to run MIDI in through USB, and an aux cable to run the sound back through something like a Casio keyboard (disabling the Casio's internal noise maker). Start up one of the inexpensive but pretty good synth programs on the iPad and go to it. (A cheap Casio lacks controller knobs, but you can use the tablet touch screen for expression)
Audio latency on Android is generally too sluggish. Have not tried ChromeOS, but I expect it's similar.
Plus, the guys that make the synth programs expect to get paid $5, $10 or $20 (depending), so I don't see this stuff moving over to one of Google's environments, where everybody expects vendors to provide free apps.
The trick is to get/make a patch that makes no sound (e.g. - sample of silence) to abuse the keyboard's "play along with MP3 player" feature. The built-in speakers on these type of $100 to $200 battery operated keyboards aren't very loud, but they work for practice or sidewalk playing.
And in recent years I have noticed a large number of ruggedized Windows devices aiming towards much the same market.
Also see Bret Victor's talk (https://vimeo.com/64895205) where he does digital puppetry using two tablets: one using direct motion input, the other with a knobs-and-sliders UI for a set of behavior controls.
There certainly are limitations due to the form factor and Apple's lockdown of the platform. Pythonista and other dev environments would be a lot more useful with less strict code sharing options. Still, you can do a lot with these things.
Maybe it's because I don't own a laptop, carry the iPad frequently and use it on my daily commute.
I agree it's not likely to replace laptops in the next couple of years for everyone but plenty of people make it work now.
(My mom is a teacher and I've helped her research and adopt a lot of this into her classroom including several iterations of iPads and augmented reality based learning games.)
What's even crazier is that many of these kids have learned how to use an iPad, gestures, games, etc before they can even read or write.
Just a few years ago it was very important for them to have a computer with the latest version of Office installed on it -- one for every kid in case they both got assignments at the same time -- but the teachers are now largely comfortable with Google Docs or Whatever. That 3-user Office 2010 license is probably my last commercial software purchase ever.
So it seems that the choice of platform is something that the grown ups worry about, but it doesn't affect the kids at all. Their school seems to have gone with Chromebooks.
But next year is college so the choices are Windows or Mac?
At a university, where it's "bring your own," you're more likely to run into situations where somebody's technology has only been tested on a handful of mainstream platforms and browsers, and if you don't have one of those, then your problems are your fault.
You'd hate to get the call: "I need to finish an assignment by tonight at 11 PM, and the software only runs on Mac or Windows."
With that said, there are low cost Windows computers that are almost throwaway, and quite robust. My carry-around computer is an Asus Windows notebook that I got for 100 bucks refurbished.
Most colleges will have no preference for Mac, Windows, Linux but there may be some courses or majors where there is an advantage to one platform over the others.
If all they are going to be using their computer for is note taking and essay writing a chromebook will be just fine. If a prof requires an assignment in the word format (which I've had one do sadly) you can still export a google doc in the word format or you can just go to one of the many computer labs and just copy paste into a word file. With a little bit of work you can even run Ubuntu on them. I've actually worked on a good number of my programming assignments from my chromebook.
If they're doing some kind of arts program then you are probably looking at getting a Mac as most prof seem to expect that's what you are using.
If you just want a safe pick go with something running Windows.
About 6 years ago I showed my oldest son (in 8th grade at the time) basic LaTeX to write papers and he would turn in the PDF files.
Sure it's all moved to Google docs now and that's fine, but the requirement for office suites never made sense.
I remember grumbling: "Why are they wasting their time learning skills that will be obsolete by the time they reach college?"
Even outside of school, word processing has gotten less important. The main "word processor" today is the e-mail program. Remaining uses for word processing include documents that nobody will ever read, and documents where there is a mandatory template, such as work instructions.
About 8 or 10 years ago, my older daughters insisted that OpenOffice wasn't a "real" word processor, since it didn't look like MS Office on XP, and we were then running Ubuntu at home (since switched to OSX, but whatever...). Then one year, the school got "Vistafied", and the whole UI they were used to got scrambled. At that point, their eyes were opened, and they stopped complaining about the system at home being "different", as well as having to pay attention to using a compatible format, since MS graciously made them painfully aware of all that, anyway.
They are now pretty used to doing stuff on the net/cloud, with whatever disposable device/UI is around that year.
From what I've observed, just watching what the kids do, it seems that function trumps form. What Google Docs does for them is provide access to their documents anywhere, and by anybody within their collaborative group. They don't need a lot of the typesetting features provided by MS Office -- if they can't express something in one way, they find another way to express it.
It's only been recently, that we can test whether people are willing to give up UX, because MS Office had the same UX at all of its price tiers. For the same general functionality -- typesetting -- folks weren't willing to put up with the UX of Libre Office, which was clunky in its own way. So I suspect that what Google Docs offers is based on function and not price.
Microsoft realised their mistake and came out with Windows 10, which works well across both tablets and desktops/laptops. Apple seem to have doubled-down. The future looks prettier for the former.
And if I'm using those, why wouldn't I want a laptop?
Sure, add on keyboards are an option, but it is a second class citizen and apps aren't primarily designed with them in mind.
In my OPINION the add-on keyboard on the Surface Pro 4 is the best attempt, but even that pales in comparison to the Surface Book, and real laptops like last year's MBP and Thinkpads.
3-in-1s might have a legitimate future (e.g. Surface Book). But they have real keyboards, not sketchy addon ones. Real laptops aren't going anywhere for people that actually need to be productive.
It does seem as if you're going to have two devices with basically the same hardware there ought to be some way to converge them.
I agree that Microsoft has probably come closest but no one seems to have fully cracked this yet.
OTOH, I often travel with an Asus Flip Chromebook and I find it sufficiently awkward as a tablet that I usually travel with my iPad as well unless I'm going very light in which case I take my Kindle Paperwhite.
Of course its useful on convertable tablets that can be used in tablet orientation.
I have for about 18 months and I never use the touch screen functionality. In fact the only time it ever gets used is when someone else tries to point at something on my screen and of course that causes a click and they awkwardly say, "Sorry, I didn't know it was a touch screen."
That's not true at all. There are plenty of Apps that work better with touch than using a mouse or touchpad. When you don't have a 9 Key, such as on a laptop, then touch becomes the preferred method of input for calculator apps or dialers. Media player applications work much better with touch than mouse. There are many apps that don't have keyboard shortcuts and custom UIs that are difficult to navigate with keyboard or mouse.
When using a laptop I use to naturally keep my left hand next to the keyboard with thumb on CTRL, index on TAB, and middle finger on ESC. After using a touchscreen laptop for 3+ years I now keep my hand rested next to the screen with for fingers behind the screen and my thumb hovering over it. I can use my thumb to flick the screen or slam the ESC key and change screens with a gesture.
Having my hand on home row is awful by comparison because my hand is completely unsupported and angled on both axis so there's a lot more strain.
There's some interesting iPad Pro software that I think will be useful, so I'm probably going to buy one of those.
The software I use has always dictated the hardware I buy.
Everyone wanted to have one 'App' store to profit as much as Google and Apple. Even Amazon has one nowadays. Steam filled a void.
What Microsoft realized is that they could add good hardware and a store to the Windows experience and get some of that profit.
I seldom see Android devices on that category at local computer stores.
Heck, that video may well be more enjoyable than any keynote Jobs ever delivered.
Most sensible would be to remove cruft in Windows and move to ARM hardware. Because Bill was not in power, new windows API(UWP) and Edge were too late. Now MS stuck with Win10 that have backward compatibility with win98 and IE11.... and dead WP.
It is already to late for MS to recover.
?
MS already already lost all chances to do a comeback. Current CEO lack product vision. Buying LinkedIn is silly where for the same price they could have ARM.
[0]https://revenuesandprofits.com/apple-vs-microsoft-revenues-a... [1]http://uk.businessinsider.com/leaked-microsoft-cloud-sales-f... [2]http://uk.businessinsider.com/chromebook-sales-versus-other-...
Do you use Windows 10 on tablets? Because compared to iOS I find it very touch unfriendly and fidgety. I use it because I develop for the 3 eco systems, but Windows I for one cannot really use it without for anything useful without a mouse. I do not have that issue with iOS or Android.
It's not quite as nice as iOS is, but it's also more flexible, which makes up for it. For instance, I can run “desktop” Windows applications on my tablet, which means I can use actual Firefox.
If ChromeOS opened up its Linux internals without using the crouton hack, it would destroy every other platform out there.
(I am a Mac user, but Windows + WSL would probably be my first choice after a Mac. Especially if Microsoft would stop spying on their users.)
There are Windows Laptops with good 10+ hour battery life (e.g. Thinkpads). But they aren't a "little more" they're $1K+. Chromebooks are around $250-400.
Here's an example with all that plus a dedicated graphics card for $549: https://www.amazon.com/Acer-Aspire-E5-575G-53VG-15-6-Inch-Wi...
Or without the dedicated graphics for $470: https://m.newegg.com/products/N82E16834315779
Currently, a Mac or not is not a question for me. I prefer macOS with such a wide margin over Windows and Linux (for the desktop) that I am willing to pay the premium. Moreover, macOS has many applications that I like and are not available on other platforms (OmniGraffle, OmniFocus, Alfred, Tweetbot, Pastebot, etc.). However, after trying WSL I for the first time had the feeling that Windows could become an alternative to consider.
They aren't $1k+. They're literally a little more than the $400 Chromebook.
You're essentially buying a very high resolution ssh terminal + documentation viewer for your $500.
If you can do your editing locally, and connect to something more beefy when needed, whoopty do. It depends on what your needs are. Personally, a really nice screen and touchpad are huge features for me... at home/work a physical switch keyboard (buckling spring or cherry-mx browns)... who cares?
I want more, you want more, but there's no need to poopoo on someone else for not aligning with your own sensibilities.
But not including RAM, CPU and disk space because they're on a server somewhere makes absolutely no sense.
SCM and CI/CD are irrelevant for the comparison because they cost exactly the same whether you use a Chromebook, a Windows laptop or a Mac.
Image manipulation and video editing are the only reasons I can think of someone would want something other than the hardware of a Chromebook. If Google opened up the Linux internals or made it dead simple to dual boot they would have a perfectly good development environment for web developers as well.
In a lot of professional environments it is not. First of all, many employers do not like uploading documents into a cloud.
Secondly, in an organization that uses Microsoft Office (which is probably still the vast majority of organizations), it is often not a replacement. A lot of Office files (especially with macros, etc.) do not work properly. Colleagues expect you return a document with updates with Office's 'track changes' functionality ("here, you have a Google Docs link with my changes to your Word document" will not fly).
I think Microsoft still has a large advantage in big organizations, due to their traditional dominance. And Office 365/Exchange has added collaboration features as well (that work with Office on Mac and Windows).
I agree, and in fact would extend it to dominance in entire industries where compatibility is key. I can imagine if a lawyer returned a 100 page M&A agreement via Google Docs they would be laughed out of the room and told to try again. Or an accountant sharing a company's entire set of financial statements in Google Sheets rather than Excel - same result.
Cloud collaboration offerings are fantastic tools in my opinion, particularly for lightweight idea sharing. I know Google has grand plans for its productivity suite, but I think it will be an uphill battle to de-throne Microsoft anytime soon due to its widespread acceptance in a lot of industries as the "standard".
I can't see that changing for a long time, I think people continue underestimate how hard it is for average adults in the workplace to jump around platforms, we are programmers (mostly) we are comfortable picking up new software and platforms as and when we need them but it's a classic case of "what applies to me applies to everyone".
That 50yo who is awesome at his job but 'useless' (by our metrics) with computers is still awesome at his job.
Perhaps not people you know, but a lot of us enjoy drawing for fun. For me, at least, Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator and a Wacom tablet is the best way to go if I want to do anything digital. Corel Painter is pretty good, too. Linux isn't a good option for any of these things.
The Windows Subsystem for Linux was so much slower than just running Ubuntu the last time I tries, the only reason I have for booting into windows is to update the skill queues for my eve characters once every few months.
Something like that, in 1996, which the IT teacher mostly tolerated. All we did was change the colour scheme and get to the programming tool the older students used. (I was 10.)
Not only teenagers. I was 7 or 8 (~1990) when my dad told me not to use our home PC without his supervision and under no circumstances should I start Norton Commander. The next day when he was at work, I booted the PC, started Norton Commander (I observed that he typed 'nc'), and tried every possible function that I could find ;).
Also, today many more kids have computers at home they can mess with if so inclined. That wasn't the case back then.
You got the proportions backwards. It would be a few guys doing something weird that confuses the technically illiterate teacher and disrupts the whole class.
I'm all for hackable computers in schools but it has to be something that can be quickly restored to a known state and used as a dead tree replacement with zero fuss. This is why Chromebooks are owning this market.
But from a software development perspective it's never been easier to write/run code in a web browser and doing something to your local computer isn't as important as making your computer do something.
iPads are definitely consumption oriented devices, and while I don't love Chromebooks, I don't think it's as dire as it seems.
These days it seems like anyone messing with hardware should have more than one computer.
Trying to get kids to Crouton on a Linux distro isn't necessarily practical, but the hardware is so cheap they can often get their own to tinker with at home. Apple and Microsoft products work to get you dependent and then strangle money out of you for as long as possible.
If you really need a full-fledged Unix system (as I do), IMO it's best to run that on dedicated hardware and SSH in from a secure Chromebook. But I'm not sure what a student like the parent's daughter would gain from putting their Chromebook into developer mode, aside from a newfound susceptibility to malware.
Which is foolish; they have the resources to devote to both, but they don't know how to do more than 1 thing at a time. The lack of bulk iPad management tools until recently (and I don't even know how good they are now) makes them almost unusable in a lot of school situations.
Lack of focus has a real cost, even to large companies. It's the difference between polished slick software, and a design-by-committee mess.
And I don't think they can really get by these days doing fewer things; I think they're right that an integrated ecosystem is the right answer, but part of that is, ecosystems are large. So they do need to do the more things, but they just don't seem to be doing the more things that well.
Apple would very likely _love_ to have a second or third profit generator. If you examine the profits taken on iPads, MacBooks, and everything else Apple does (see http://www.asymco.com) relative to the iPhone, it is a one trick pony.
Hard to peel apart your "focus" when 85% of your business relies on it.
They have enough cash reserves to keep going for a long time, as well as other product lines that were successful enough to get them to where they are.
tl;dr We are switching to Chromebooks next year and will be able to outfit 3 entire grade levels for almost the same price as purchasing iPads for 1 grade level. Apple has lost it's way and I'm not sure it can come back. It used to chase ideals, now it chases money.
However, as a parent and as a long-time Apple user, I think they are completely incompetent at multi-user scenarios in general - Classroom 2.0 is "cute" but impractical in the few times I tried to help teachers to use it, iPad multi-user is nowhere to be seen in practice, and the price points are completely outrageous (my kids' school uses iPads).
To add insult to injury, parental control is also MIA (tangent, I know, but relevant in the overall picture).
Chromebooks walk all over that - they're cheaper, have pretty decent unified management (not really business-grade, but straightforward and effective enough for K12, for instance), and they have real keyboards.
Things start flaking out a bit upmarket (when you're in college, a Chromebook and Google services might not be the best computer/environment to use depending on your major, for a lot of reasons), but in general, and from what I picked up during a deep dive into the education segment a couple of months ago, I'm not surprised they're popular.
What I _am_ surprised (and then again, not much, really) is that Google and their hardware partners don't seem to tackle European markets in earnest. I had to buy a Chromebook in the US for my own use, and if I were to replace it today I would probably have to have something shipped from the US again - they are nowhere to be found in retail in my neck of the woods, and European online retailers only seem to stock a few outdated models.
So I guess the scenario the article describes is going to remain US-only for a long while.
For a brief timeframe, our local Saturn in Germany had quite some models. But now they seem to have all but disappeared. They used to sell them on the German Google Store as well, but now they are not offer there either.
I have only been in Germany a couple of years, but there seems to be a quite strong anti-cloud/Google sentiment. (For good reasons.)
Localisation and market size are factors, obviously...
Since you cannot use a Chromebook fully without signing in, everything you do in the operating system is tracked and recorded by Google and tied to your identity. Why is this even considered remotely acceptable?
The amount of data that Google captures about students must simply be staggering.
It's simply not enough to say that the data is "anonymised" (a meaningless term when you have so much data about a user's online habits), or only viewed in aggregated form. This still means the data can be interrogated and mined for information in ways we can't begin to imagine.
It remains baffling why the tech industry is so silent on this important subject.
People should read that and form their own opinion either way.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/01/google-st...
They were also tracking students once they used Google services that were not covered by Google Apps for Education (which is kind of hard to avoid, since you have to sign in on a Chromebook):
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/10/google-changes-its-tun...
Really, the only acceptable option would be a Linux distro. Not a commercial software.
https://www.eff.org/wp/school-issued-devices-and-student-pri...
Even then -- creating an Apple ID is quite a different matter from (potential) ongoing tracking of a user's online activity.
If the problem is privacy, the only acceptable option would be a Linux distro properly optimized for school kids. The problem is, it needs to have a nice dashboard for administration since Chromebooks are popular in schools thanks to the ease of administration (most schools can't afford to maintain seasoned SysOps). AFAIK, nobody is working in this kind of product right now, so Linux distros are not the answer either.
I suspect this is like the iPhone screen size issue. Apple had some very good reasons for keeping the screen size small, but ultimately consumers found large phones to be more valuable, and in the end, Apple's commitment to small screen size held them back. You listed a bunch of really good arguments against touch screen laptops—and I agree with them—but tons of people who use touch screen laptops nevertheless find the value in it outweighs those negatives. Eventually, Apple will have to concede to the marketplace's wishes.
I had thought that the convenient form factor of lighter, less frills tablets would make them continually more appealing to kids or less technical adults regardless of where the device is used. But that does not seem to be the preferred case in a school setting, especially as a student gets older. I think it reflects a desire to be taken more seriously, and the appearance of the tools being used matters a lot, even if the same type or quality of work could be done using a Chromebook or iPad.
We provision all new employees at our small manufacturing company with Chromebooks.
Here in Europe Windows still reigns supreme.
I am yet to see any Chromebook on sale besides a few discounters trying to get rid of them. Some of which already returned by customers, being sold with heavy discounts.
Is google addressing this? I'd love to see chromebooks used here but the privacy issue is real and if kids' personal or school data is being harvested on a US server, it's tough to advocate for them.
https://support.google.com/googlecloud/answer/6056694?hl=en for EU compliance stuff, they have all the answers you'd expect
And, in spite of the fact that I hardly know anyone who uses Windows as their primary machine--and they're almost certainly in the minority at events I attend--Windows marketshare is still dominant.
you are misinformed. as per Google's G Suite for Education FAQs:
> For all EDU domains, ads are turned off in G Suite for Education services and K–12 G Suite for Education users don't see ads when they use Google Search and are signed in to their G Suite for Education accounts.
and
> G Suite for Education services don't collect or use student data for advertising purposes or to create ad profiles.
and
> Like many email providers, we do scanning in Gmail to keep our customers secure and to improve their product experience. In Gmail for G Suite for Education, this includes virus and spam protection, spell check, relevant search results and features like Priority Inbox and auto-detection of calendar events. Scanning to provide product features is done on all incoming emails and is 100% automated. We do NOT scan G Suite for Education emails for advertising purposes.
via https://support.google.com/a/answer/139019?hl=en
edited to include URL.
Chrome sync is enabled by default, which sends browsing history through google servers. Google says they don't use that data for advertising purposes. The EFF's position here seems to be that it is literally impossible for the data to exist on Google's servers without it being used for advertising purposes.
https://www.eff.org/issues/student-privacy/faq#faq-What-data...?
Quite honestly any mandatory "account" (particularly in an educational setting) gives me the willies. A mandatory account with a private company, let alone the largest advertiser and data miner in the world - well, forgive me if that starts to feel like a corporate dystopia.
Every platform has limitations. Windows and Mac seem to have the least. But does "real work" just mean whatever device you like best?
I would say it's whatever device allows you to perform your job functions in the way that best suits your lifestyle.
The exception is setting up printing -- Google Cloud Print, printer companies, and wifi router manufacturers leave a lot to be desired when it comes to setting up wireless printing.
They did the job perfectly well - why aren't today's computers being used for the same things? You don't even need books. Class, take out your device and open Wikipedia to the article on volcanoes...
Also audio and video editing, art, a lot of researching topics to write essays, working together building models in minecraft to learn about volcanos. And I consider the school all that happens in to be not that advanced in their usage.
Back in the mid 90's Larry Ellison said, "we need computers that do less, not more". He was widely ridiculed at that time. Now we know he was right.
The real lesson, I think, is that most people don't want to _manage_ devices. They don't want to deal with backups, they don't want to manage disks, filesystems and drivers, and if you can take all of that away they'll be happy to store all their documents in your cloud.
For business, it depends.
I think my company is fairly typical in that we offer fully managed systems but don't require that people go that route. (But you're more or less on your own for support if you choose to self-manage.)
The origins of VNC are an AT&T project where people would wear RFC tags, walk up to any workstation and have their session. This was long before Ellison was talking about Network Computers. There is also John Gage from Sun's motto, "the network is the computer."
I have studied at several educational institutions in Europe, Indonesia and Australia, and I never had anything else than a Windows device (either laptop or desktop PC) (except in cases where the arrangement was BYOD).
EDIT: spelling
Could one of those folks explain why they think Chromebooks are succeeding so well, if the apps are vastly inferior?
Disgusting! Germs! Monoculture!
This is some of the worst grasping at straws I've ever seen on HN. Just admit that you are wrong here, you're being completely ridiculous. Cleaning a laptop screen isn't a big deal, and in fact you should be regularly cleaning any Macbook Pro retina display if you care about it's longevity. Oils from the keyboard are regularly transferred to the screen every time you close your macbook, and MBP retina screens are susceptible to staining when the anti-reflective coating wears off.
This is false. If the keyboard continuously touches the screen, it will get damaged eventually. If this happens to your MBP all the time, you should think about handling your MBP differently and protect the lid from outside pressure.
> and MBP retina screens are susceptible to staining when the anti-reflective coating wears off.
So you should touch and clean it even more? Who is the ridiculous one here?
Did you even use a touch screen laptop that does not fold in a 180° angle? I did and it sucks. It really, really sucks. Your arm gets tired after 30 minutes, the display will look like grease city in typical fluorescent office light, and due to the interface changes to make buttons clickable with your fingers, you lose like 50% of your screen space.