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Comment by quest88 | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't that make things more expensive so that only the rich can continue to be better off?

The track record in other industry is that it might make things more expensive at first then back to affordable once the engineering solutions have matured. There is a clear incentive for companies in making things cheaper after all. It means both more profits and access to new market segments. That’s the magic of legislation: it can be very effective as a tool to give a direction to research and development.

There is plenty of stuff I cannot afford, and I am perfectly fine with it.

That's not a good rebuttal. The context is $250 laptops that afford students technology literacy for cheap. Not, I can't afford a yacht and I'm ok with it, ergo everyone else can be ok with things they can't afford.

My netbook from 2009 that is still working, was sold with a Linux distribution, and gotten multiple Ubuntu updates, and is still working perfectly fine.

Its price? 300 euros.

So apparently not something that is only for people that can only afford yachtes.

Well, there is some blame to be put on education system for not going open, but chromebooks are significantly less IT maintenance than average linux laptop.

In ideal world it would be non-profit partnering with hardware vendors to produce <educational linux distro> and certify various devices for it. Then non-profit could continue to develop the systems and vendors would have incentive (schools will buy your hardware) to help.

Thankfully the Chromebooks in schools phenomen, is mostly an US school system thing, and as such not a problem in most of the world.

Where parents get to decide what systems their kids use, and mostly with OSes where planned obsolence isn't part of the deal.

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