Chromebooks Were Once a Good Deal for Schools. Now They’re Becoming E-Waste
wsj.com
wsj.com
But repeats of the same basic story make it to the frontpage multiple times per month:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36857506
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35667547
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37006174
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35649281
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36871178
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35632233
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36083380
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36857208
For this reason, and the part where the children's privacy is sold to Google, and the part where the children are taught to rely on someone else's computer (in particular big US corps), and the part where the pupils need to agree to some private corp's ToS for what is mandatory and public, schools should never have signed for this. No, it was not a good deal.
It's sad Google seems to be the only player in this space who really cares about security. Every other OS is a shitshow by comparison.
One can run ChromeOS on old, used devices. They won't have quite the same security, but are a lot better than nothing.
So if a school buys 100 thinkpads, and 100 chromebooks, how long do you think they will last?
They will all become e-waste sooner or later, and most likely sooner in an education environment where they're being lent out to pupils.
There is a bigger problem at play here, a massive culture of consumption. I fail to see how pointing the finger at chromebooks specifically is more than a distraction.
> So if a school buys 100 thinkpads, and 100 chromebooks, how long do you think they will last?
As things currently stand, both will suffer hardware failures at alarming rates because children are terrifying and have very active lifestyles, but the thinkpads will only stop being useful when the hardware dies, while the Chromebooks will be artificially capped by their software, resulting in the thinkpads outliving them.
> I fail to see how pointing the finger at chromebooks specifically is more than a distraction.
Because Chromebooks force the machine to become e-waste regardless of how worn the hardware is. Everything may suck, but they suck more and on purpose.
They have a built-in kill switch. After pre-set number of years (from launch and not from purchase) they become useless to schools.
Macs and PCs only die when they die, not when they hit their cut-off date. At that point the other devices have resale values and 'expired' Chromebooks don't.
> There is a bigger problem at play here, a massive culture of consumption.
Then pointing the finger at Chromebooks is extremely relevant, as enforced lifetime limits lead to (relatively) rapidly replaced devices with no future beyond landfill and more consumption.
Relevant: "how and why I stopped buying new laptops" https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/12/how-and-why-i-stop...
It’d be cool if there were efforts to sell kits that allow users to outfit old laptops with higher-capacity (but not physically larger) batteries, quieter cooling, and USB-PD.
It is unfortunate if you get yours eg. one year before the end of the prescribed lifecycle.
This is impractical on most Chromebooks because of how locked into Chrome OS they are. They're more like cheap Android phones with locked bootloaders than they are proper laptops.
I’m surprised that the mention of Google hasn’t yet tarnished a brand. They’re just a big tech incumbent.
More and more companies are moving to 4 and 5 year replacement cycle. The average today for my company is 4.5 years between replacement laptops for the average employee.
For desktops it is 7-8 with some going to 10 years for replacements.
Then they are wiped and given to employee's who continue to use them for many more years. I have given my parents one of these both are still using it, one of which was ironically reimaged from Win7 to CloudReady (now called ChomeOS Flex) and it is still going strong today more than 10 years after its manufacture date.
It'll never work.
All that is needed for teaching is a teacher with a blackboard, and a student with pencil and paper. Right up through quantum mechanics.
Chromebooks are among the better-documented and more open hardware platforms. The document above indicates how to disable firmware write protection both within and without the operating system.
It also includes this quote:
> Since the start of the project, the Chrome OS team strongly believes that when someone buys a device, they own it fully. ... To that end, we strongly believe that users must be free to fully program their device in any way they want.
Can you point to any ChromeOS devices that have violated this principle?
If this is the case, then why doesn't Google provide an official utility to install another OS on it?
You probably want one that supports uefi firmware, which I think is libreboot.
At least it was possible to hack the devices, but no such bullshit is ever necessary on any regular laptop.
Opening the laptop would not void any warranty in the EU, or US.
That is FUD. Manufacturers can not prevent people from "opening their devices" with threats of voiding warranty, and even putting the stickers that say that are illegal for which the FTC sent a latter to many manufacturers including Apple to tell them to knock that off.
The problem I see is that school budgets don't account for such expenses on the regular, so schools end up using hardware for years and years after EOL.
Either way, seems like a good deal to me.
That's a meaningful distinction; most hardware can keep running current software for a long time after it's theoretically EOL, but Chromebooks stop updating their software outright when the hardware falls out of support.
This isn't the case for Android because of the SOC blob and how entwined it is with the Linux kernel, but that reasoning doesn't apply here.
A disposable laptop is an absurd concept. The idea itself should feel appalling.
Maybe there's a hidden cost to pay for making e-waste disposable hardware which is felt at the environmental level.
I'm pretty disturbed at how this waste is not considered in the rich west, as it only looks at the monetary cost of the device and not at the fact that those devices most likely end up in landfills much sooner than should be accepted.
Just becasue we can financially accept such a thing, doesn't mean we should, for the sake of the environment.
Besides, after several years of use by kids, I have a hard time imagining these things becoming anything other than waste.
And where I live in the west, I pay an additional tax for products which create e-waste (namely consumer electronics) and I must dispose of them at appropriate facilities. E-waste is definitely a problem but it's not a relevant factor here as far as I can tell.
I could just install Linux but the battery is definitely worse when not on chromeOS
Surely we can do better than this both software and hardware wise.