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Comment by throwfish3000 | Hacker News Reader

Chromebooks that run on Google services are already the default 1:1 device in schools. They're cheap, they take a beating and have good battery life.

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Same here. They’re subsidized by taking kids’ privacy.

That would be illegal in many jurisdictions. And schools in general take privacy very seriously. Most schools won't sign up for google edu without a solid privacy guarantee.

Google is likely very happy to give up on the privacy violations for a few years of a child's life in exchange for getting that child hooked on Google services so they can freely violate privacy for an entire adult lifetime.

> without a solid privacy guarantee.

That’s a promise, no technical guarantee. Then there’s Cloud Act and FISA.

> Google is likely very happy to give up on the privacy violations

“likely”, exactly. This can change any time. We’ll just have to trust them. Scrolling through this thread it seems about zero trust in a US ad company who’s specialty is feeding off people’s privacy.

We should by now demanding technical guarantees. Open source, end-to-end encrypted with e.g. an overseer board checking the company. Companies like Proton are doing this.

And normalizing google's model of computing, surveillance, locked down platforms etc...

I don't know what the "default" is, but as a data point of one: my kids' public school is all Windows laptops.

The default is very very heavily weighted in Googles "Chromebook" favour. Getting a school with Windows (or Mac) exclusivity is a 4-leaf clover. Google genuinely have a pretty good product with Google Classroom though, so it's not completely lost. It's just a problem when schoolkids grow up and end up with new Windows/Mac laptops and have no idea how computers work outside of the web browser.

I'd assume this opens up 'Googlebooks' to compete with the GPU/M Series Premium laptops so schools can provide them to teach things like Photoshop, Illustrator, CAD Design, anything that chromebooks couldn't do, right?

The performance of the machine offered at schools seems to get just a little worse every year too... like one of these days they won't have to worry about kids playing Krunker in class because they won't be able to.

My kids schools all use ipads

It would be so much better for the student's IT proficiencies if the were some ordinary Linux computers instead. Preferably with limited central managment.

The Chromebooks are probably cheaper than the hardware itself could be, but that's a good demonstration of the issue.

It wouldn’t. The central management of Chromebook is what makes the whole system usable. All you’d be doing is sentencing school IT folks to endless, endless support requests.

Funny. At my son's school in Germany, students may bring any device they want without central administration (just Wifi and web platforms). It works quite well without inundating IT staff with support requests. (To achieve at least some similarity of systems, you get a partial refund if you buy either iPads or convertible notebooks running Windows. My son's notebook technically runs Windows but he mostly uses plain Debian Linux with Xournal++.)

That sounds wonderful for tech literate families. Probably less so for ones that aren’t, how many are loaded down with crappy spyware, I wonder?

Who would run the cloud side, or at least the networked backup service?

Sorry, I love Linux, but could you imagine managing a fleet of the cheapest hardware possible and also teaching a bunch of 6th graders how to use Linux? School IT workers are already heroes. I don't like Google, but they're a necessary evil to keep those guys from tearing their hair out every day unless we dedicate significantly more resources to computing in schools.

We managed fine with crappy old Windows XP Thinkpads in elementary school. Modern Linux is far easier, and I'm saying the slight challenge would be educational.

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