The Digital Divide Starts with a Laptop Shortage
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Backbreaking work and I am extremely sick of of MacOS recovery right now (and the 1000 tricks needed to get each laptop back to factory condition), but totally worth it. Just today a teacher from Fremont wrote in with a heart breaking email about how much a difference a 2015 Mac Pro made to his day and how better his online teaching is because of it. Got through around 200 devices in total including some iPads.
During my adventures distributing / collecting these laptops, I caught COVID - no good deed goes un-punished. I'm pretty sure there are at least 5k more Mac's sitting in companies IT closets from where they renewed equipment for employees but couldn't throw away the 3 thousand dollar device they bought 3 years prior - donating these is a tax break as well so the companies would be best to dispose of them than keep them around.
1. You can download the recovery USB drive from the dell website.
2. A recovery USB can be used to fix any number of dell machines as long as they shipped with the same OS. So what that means is that if I got 10 Windows-7 Dell laptops, I can fix them all with one USB drive.
3. There is no need to mess with Windows keys as they are embedded in the BIOS.
What issues did you encounter? Shouldn't recreating the disk with Disk Utility remove all traces of the old MacOS install, or did you encounter issues with Find My Mac?
- unlocking the laptop (knowing an existing password, Apple ID or firmware password). Probably 3 in 10 laptops are non-trivial. I have 5 laptops with unknown firmware passwords that I am planning on removing the SPI flash on to wipe out the password (just for funsies... seems like an interesting challenge!)
- upgrading to Catalina via USB installation image. If the OS image is jumping several versions (or actually being downgraded from a security patch release), here be dragons. Typically the USB installer pulls down another installer via Wi-Fi and then has to perform a random "this disk needs an upgrade" routine which 50% of the time results in bad thing happening and I'd be left with the flashing question mark. Then its time to start over again.
- After installing and setting up Catalina (so I can smoke test the functionality), I'd wipe the disk and reinstall from USB one last time so it was fresh. Randomly, the re-install would fail in a mysterious way and I'd have to go around a third time.
Weird. I had the opposite problem.
Mid 2012 Macbook, couldn't get El Capitan to install at all, but installing directly to Catalina from the USB worked first try.
One I encounter a lot is that if the recovery mode wants to install El Capitan, it can't unless you change the date in terminal, and then fight the internet/installation to get the install done before NTP screws it up.
It's not a particularly hard problem to work around, just an example of something that can pop up while in mac's recovery mode.
We also put a public wifi outside the building. That helped a lot of students out.
Ideally someone would create a boot stick to wipe them, install Linux and Chrome, and easily pass them off to schools.
Start a charity and you could even give people a tax credit for their old machine. I’m sure that $30 would get people to give up a lot of them.
I haven't been involved in a while, so I'm not sure what the process is for laptops, but I know they reuse those as well.
I love this kind of embedded, community driven pedagogy.
The really old stuff, if it still runs, that might be hell. You wouldn't want someone to do video-calls on it anyway.
I've been installing various distro flavours on old laptops for a long time, and the experience only gets better. Personally, I can't remember the last time I had to struggle with a driver. I think the Dell I've got is from 2008, running Mint without issue.
There are so many old/used computers out there that are capable of doing everything the average person needs, the people just don't know it. I had an acquaintance buy a $2500 computer to take some community college programming courses, because he thought you need a powerful computer to "run programs".
Meanwhile, I'm over here earning a living on a t450s I bought for $300.
It was usable though, albeit very slow.
The response I got just now was that most of their students have laptops, but often internet/Wi-Fi is an issue. I live in a very affluent city, so I suspect the situation is far more dire a few districts away.
Although actual internet service is only half the battle. Chromebooks (used by my kid's school and issued/recommended by many districts) just seem to suck at connectivity. Even with a symmetrical 1Gbps internet connection, it was a non-stop battle for the first 2-3 weeks of school. A few things I learned along the way:
- Chromebooks hate dual-band SSIDs. All of the kids were issued different Chromebook models, and this was a universal truth for all of them. Separate SSIDs for 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz is critical.
- Chromebooks hate mesh networks. May not be universally true, but is at least the case for the mesh network created using a standard ATT Fiber gateway and the Airtie extenders they sell[2]. No matter the disparity in signal strength, they'd do their damndest to try to connect to the AP they first connected to.
- Chromebooks hate "wide band" networks (i.e. 40Mhz 2.4Ghz networks and 80Ghz 5Ghz networks). Even in uncrowded airspace, they seem to have problems.
- Chromebooks seem to have decent plug-n-play support for USB ethernet adapters, but mediocre support for USB wifi adapters. Neither of which is found in the official documentation; the only way to have any confidence that a particular dongle/adapter will be supported is to cross-reference the chipset of the adapter with the net drivers in the source code[3].
- It's an oddly common issue for Chromebooks to have loose wifi antennas internally. Probably not in higher-end models, but definitely in the lower-end models issued by schools.
I finally got things working stably, but it was mind-boggling how fussy they are. And many of the issues (such as the first two) only became apparent during live video streams, so it was a constant battle of fiddling with stuff in the evenings and testing it via performance during classes the next day.
With the amount and type of troubleshooting required to get to that point, it's no wonder wifi issues are the prominent complaint.
[1] https://www.t-mobile.com/business/education/project-10-milli...
[2] https://www.att.com/buy/accessories/internet-equipment/att-s...
[3] https://github.com/neverware/kernel/tree/master/drivers/net
* Wealth and funding divide, caused by lack of a (fully funding) national budget and distribution system.
* An access to the Information Superhighway divide, mostly enabled by failing to classify the underlying structure as a utility, which all (taxpayers) pay to pave out (like roads) and then maybe have services on top of (like power, water, sewer; things that the very poor might have discounted rates on, but still first class access to).
* A resource allocation issue; because having these research tools at home and a way of using them with the collective knowledge of our species (the Internet) wasn't even on the horizon before, and efforts to remotely approach it were hampered by the budget issues mentioned above. Yet even in the very affluent districts I suspect a computer lab at school or in a very nice library is the best current state of affairs.
* As CGP Grey correctly noted (I can't remember if this was in a video, podcast, or just on a forum somewhere): schools are really warehouses for mass babysitting kids during the day and also places of training them to be humans, rather than animals. Surely I'm not the only person that, by the end of highschool, viewed schools as 'day prison for minors, with access to limited training'.
I guess the shortage really is in people being able to refurbish them?
The last "new" computer I bought was a decade ago. You can find 2-4 year old thinkpads on eBay, buy new batteries, replacements for anything structural or cosmetic, replace and max out anything that's upgradeable, and end up with a very clean, nearly top-of-the-line machine that's easily good for another decade, all for less than the Black Friday price of the current model.
https://www.bobble.tech/free-stuff/used-thinkpad-buyers-guid...
Are there any similar sites for other manufacturers, e.g. for Dell?
My two cents from working in a repair shop: Don't bother buying Dell/HP pre-owned. They're not worth the hassle, unless it's one of their enterprise grade toughbooks or equivalent.
But if there's a laptop shortage, and you need one for school, and have all summer to sort it out, it's really not that bad.
What we have is really a new laptop shortage, because supply chains got all screwed up. But few people will notice the difference between Intel's 8th and 10th gen CPUs.
We have mountains of "old" laptops that are perfectly usable... They're mostly just a little dirty.
If it doesn’t have an SSD yet that’s another thing to replace.
But replacing the CPU is usually not good value. Old top of the line parts are still pretty expensive (since there are at most two generations of CPUs for a platform there is not much to choose from), so that’s usually not worth it.
I am sure that it is possible to get these computers. For example, lots of places are shutting down offices to move to remote-only, and I am seeing tens of computers at liquidation auctions every week...but it is obviously difficult to get this to where they are needed (and at liquidation, these things are still being given away...$50 or so for a 4th gen Intel, with monitor/keyboard/mouse).
But I suppose not many people know where to get things or how to make it work themselves. It always has to be new, new, new. Also, realistically, you should be able to do work on a phone...the idea with phones is/was that they are replacing the functionality of towers. It isn't ideal but it should be possible.
> As I mentioned in last month’s update, back-to-school
> programs run by large companies created a severe LCD
> shortage on the market. The market, which already suffered
> from low panel volumes (caused by the COVID-19 pandemic),
> has now been practically drained of grade-A LCD panels
> within the target price-range. As I explained last month,
> purchasing from the open market isn’t an option. Open
> market LCD panels come without warranty or reliable
> quality assurance that vendors always offer.
> According to some projections LCD panels ought to be
> available again in December. Granted this projection is
> accurate, we may see new batches available prior to the
> Chinese New Year (February 2021).
[1] https://www.pine64.org/2020/10/15/update-new-hacktober-gear/
I find this puzzling. I've bought probably over a thousand books of all sorts from thrift stores, often for less than a buck. I have a nice set of encyclopedias I cannot give away. There's a sign at the local used book shop "we don't want encyclopedias". There are two Little Free Libraries in my neighborhood I salt with good scifi books, no takers. The local supermarket parking lot has a dumpster which says it collects books, lots of mine wind up there.
I gave a box of scifi books to the electrician who came by to do some repairs.
I buy grab-bag boxes of scifi off of ebay for $.50 a book.
Books are not hard to come by.
If someone could make a program that “just does it” for you. It would make reusing old laptops of various configurations viable.