Schools bought millions of Chromebooks and 3 years later they’re breaking down

Like, for example, it might not occur to a child that if you stack 10 textbooks on top of your backpack in your locker — where your laptop/tablet is held in a vertical pocket inside the backpack, and everything else in the backpack is just clothes or something, and so the laptop/tablet is acting as the load-bearing support for all those textbooks — then if you've got an all-plastic device, its chassis will probably flex apart and crack; or if you've got a metal-and-glass device, it'll probably buckle and bend.

Learning a basic corollary to a law of physics by breaking something usually feels really embarrassing, though — a "why didn't I expect that that would happen? I must be stupid!" kind of feeling. So kids really don't like to admit it happened.

But they really were being careful! They were trying as hard as they could! They just didn't have all the information on what they need to pay attention to to avoid breaking a thing, yet.

(And, to be clear, an opaque warning to "never do X" doesn't give them that information, because there's no backing intuition, so while they might remember it in the moment for that specific case, they won't be able to translate it to any related case. What they need is the backing intuition itself — the understanding of the causal process that makes bad things happen, such that if they imagine doing X or Y or Z, then they'll picture the causal process that applies, and so automatically infer for themselves that [unwanted consequence] will follow.)

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Tangent, in the mode of a game designer:

There are many "practical, everyday corollaries to the laws of physics" that a child will just learn from interacting with the world. And for others, there are common "learning toys" you can buy for children that teach them certain principles.

But there are rather a lot of these physical principles that are more niche — plastic deformation under stress of seemingly-rigid bodies being one of them — where you just won't personally observe them in a regular childhood (unless your parents are nerds who like watching "historical failures of engineering" documentaries), and where it's hard for regular physical toys to model them. (A physical toy demonstrating plastic deformation would necessarily be single-use!)

Growing up myself, I (subconsciously) learned a lot about these more niche corollaries in my tween years, from playing with physics-sim computer games in my middle-school computer lab. I feel like physics-sim games were a great supplement to my ability to predict the physical world.

There are real simulational "set things up and see what happens when you press Go" sandbox 'games' that should be standard issue for every school-issued laptop/tablet, because kids can play with them and end up learning getting a feel for these principles that are hard to end up with personal experience with otherwise.

There are also real games, that actually gamify the process of developing intuitions around more specific principles. Games like Kerbal Space Program, Poly Bridge, etc. They won't teach you the math, but you'll be very ready to learn the math, far ahead of the kids who just see opaque formulae without the intuitive sense for what it's doing.

But, as far as I'm aware, there's no physics-sandbox that models plastic deformation of materials, let alone a game that gamifies the process of developing an intuition for it. (Poly Bridge might simulate stress/strain and buckling at the joints, but it won't give you any sense for the fact that a seemingly rigid body like a steel girder can end up crumpling like a wet paper bag under enough compressive stress, or pulling like taffy under enough tensile stress.)

And that's a shame. Someone should develop one. Maybe then kids would stop stacking books on their backpacks.

It went into the shop twice that year. Both times because I had tripped over the power cable. I would say I cherished it and yet as a teenager you're just not as careful with items as you should be. That PowerBook 190 was a rugged beast, and that's probably the only thing that kept it running as well as it did.

They're great if they're used for taking notes and using web based services. But if they need to start accessing network drives or school applications they're often not that great.

Especially for teachers.

I'll presume to assume the above was meant to say 'something isn't working', but it makes so much more sense as written.

I'm pretty sure writing notes on paper is better for learning. Something about engaging more of the brain through motor skills.

The company I'm at does a ton in network refreshes in the education space from E-Rate (government funding) for K-12 to ritzy universities. I've seen everything from Windows devices to iPads to Chromebooks to Android tablets to MacBooks and the schools using Chromebooks for assigned devices as throwaways always have the least trouble.

Parents take $1000, kid still comes to school with no laptop, what happens next?

Contrast that with a decade later and this attitude of disposability is a no-go. But they were selling that as an advantage.

My partner is a tech at a first school here in the UK, and they have Chromebooks - pretty much one per child.

Most of them have needed to be put back together because the hinge attachment to the case is not strong enough. The screws are not well fitted from the factory, and as soon as it comes loose, the mounting can get damaged because where the brass inserts are set in the plastic is pretty flimsy, and will crack. So they end up with a chromebook which can be 'kind of' repaired if you put the screws back in really tight, but it's only so long that it will last as that area has no real strength to it.

If this part of these was made better (these are Asus C201, but there are others that are similar), then they would never have been a problem aside from the obvious actual abuse that about 10% of them get from children who have behavioural issues.

Others mentioned here (such as Dell) are better, but have other issues - the Dell ones have glass in front of the screens, which can break, and leaves razor-sharp splinters when it does. It's also a nightmare to replace as parts are difficult to get (we had to order them from the US, and paid quite a bit for each one), and they are macbook-like in the difficulty of repair here.

Making these much stronger (like many times stronger) would not have cost a lot. They just skimped on plastic in a few places, leading them to be weak in the field. Another £1 spent per unit would have meant almost none of them would have suffered this. The later model (C202) were better, but still broke in the same place, with the same failure mode for the most part.

Then again, it stays on a shelf, but it hasn't had any mystery developments in play. Maybe the screen has washed out a little but that's it.

This mindset is likely a significant contributor to climate change and numerous other global issues. A fundamental shift in values is desperately needed. We could consume less meat without sacrificing affordability, invest in reusable technology without breaking the bank, and make similar choices regarding cars. We opt for plastic simply because it's marginally cheaper than glass and metal, and we prefer frying pans with PFAs to save a mere 15 seconds of cleaning time. We shun nuclear energy like Molten Salt Reactors due to the inconvenience of waste handling, despite its relatively short duration of 300 years compared to the thousands of years it will take to restore atmospheric carbon levels. We buy clothing and blood diamonds from brands known for child labor, slavery, and bloodshed because they convey status.

Have we stopped buying everything Nestle makes for us despite so much of their vehemently unethical behaviour? Was cheating emissions software not enough for us to stop buying VW cars? How many Foxconn suicides does it take for you to reconsider an iPhone? How many more wars on drugs will we wage before we stop paying pharma bros for OxyCotin? Are there no alternative companies to Bayer to buy from or was knowingly infecting Africans with HIV not a big enough violation of trust in a medical company? Surely if Tesla produced only my car, their brutal lithium mining using children and disposal scandal wouldn't be a big deal.

The blame lies with us. As consumers, we consistently make decisions that go against our best interests in terms of health, finances, and the future of our children. Industries only cater to the demands we create. It is nothing short of absurd to believe that manufacturers would continue to supply unrepairable technology or products that harm us if we simply refused to buy them.

Anybody who has more than a passing interest will go "but what about x?", e.g., "how do they make games then?" or "how do they make movies then?" or "how do I write an app then?". Most kids weren't and still aren't interested, but the ones who are, will beg, steal, borrow or buy yesteryear junk to fiddle with.

Did I miss anything?

I'm not sure that the value-add for Chromebooks as personal machines is still there at that point, at least personally. For me 50 dollars is worth the freedom of operating system/double the ram/ddr5/3:2/decent resolution/m2 interface/separation from Google.

The fact that they couldn't do very much unless you learned to program them was a distinct advantage compared to the PCs that followed - which were used to teach Microsoft Office, not computing - and is why Silicon Valley is packed full of mid-30s-40s Brits.

The key things with these devices was the accessibility and the ability to "get under the covers" and use it.

It wasn't a device to delivery courses, it was a tool - just as much as a hammer in shop class was a tool. Yea, we all played Oregon trail... but I've still got fond memories of Rocky's Boots ( https://archive.org/details/Rockys_Boots_1982_Learning_Compa... ).

Chromebooks and smart phones (I believe) are too far away from the computing of the device.

With the Apple ][+ I recall wanting to make a program that showed maps of the world in low rez graphics... and the corresponding learning more about loops than the librarian understood and using the DATA block along with READ to read it and learning how to compress 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1 into 255.

There are a couple things going on though with the expectations. I could write a program that would look amateur but comparable to what was professional at that time using BASIC. The web of old that we fondly look back to with Myspace didn't take masterful skills to get to what was similarly acceptable.

Today, to get something that is vaguely comparable to what you expect when you use a computing device takes a lot of work. Swift Playgrounds and Scratch aren't enough. There is a high discouragement factor and the expectations of what someone who wants to do what I did with BASIC or simple web pages back then is a lot of work.

I would be tempted to say that instead of general computing and scratch we should look at teaching kids Excel... and I might get some flack for that. The main thing is that with Excel you look at what can be done and it's not too far from making a column have the values of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16. You can get something that is useful without too much work and without expecting it to look as nice as a fancy page or game. And as they learn how to do more, you can introduce them to =LAMBDA.

The tax payer?

There’s a lot of things taxes fund that do not allow decision making / control by those who pay the taxes.

They're much better than android devices in that sense

They have a fixed date where they stop receiving updates (eight years from when the model is released) but they are guaranteed to receive updates until then

So you have companies trying to make it look like they're offering the most, but costing the least, and hiding those costs elsewhere (planned obsolescence)