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Comment by sdo72 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how this would help people to fix this device as the laptop is being sold only to educational entities in bulk. Normal users won't be able to buy. Most people can't fix these since they belong to schools and the schools probably won't spend money on fixing these.

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Have you considered that it might help the people at the school fix it?

Yes, and that it could help inquisitive students? I know in the old days nerdy kids would do teardowns before we even had YouTube. I would assume kids these days still do it.

I think kids definitely can fix their own laptops if they're theirs.

In this case, the school would prohibit the kids to open or attempt fixing any of the laptop. And why kids should even attempt fixing it? They can turn it in to get a "new" laptop. Thus, this doesn't happen.

I doubt that the school IT people would attempt to fix it. That's a different job. I haven't heard a school IT person even attempts to replace a laptop battery. Any attempt fixing it has a good amount of risk of breaking the laptops. Hence, they school would have to outsource or rely on a 3rd party to fix and the cost would become even higher.

If it’s under warranty they send it out for the depo repair, but I have been that IT guy before and when there was down time I did crack open dead machines to try and bring them back to life.

The somewhat-cynical answer (in addition to the obvious answer that it still is useful for employees of companies that buy it) is that this helps continue rebuilding goodwill among techies, hackers, etc. Much like their investment in open source, there is nontrivial ROI from marketing and reputation alone. They are probably trying to stay ahead of Right To Repair sentiment.

Many schools and school districts have technicians to repair hardware like projectors and computers. When I was in high-school (10 years ago), we were pretty early in the laptop-for-every-student transition, and there were 1-2 part-time technicians who would repair laptops all day long.

See my other comment above.

Hiring a part-time technician to fix the hardware isn't cheap. It's probably cheaper to outsource it to a 3rd party or even sell away the laptop and buy a new one. It doesn't make economic senes to have a technician to fix a $250 laptop.

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