AFAIK you don’t need ID to buy juice, sugar, and yeast to make your own alcohol, so I think it should be the same for computer parts.
I and pretty much everyone else in my childhood TeamSpeak server did at roughly 14 years of age.
Maybe for the next few years you'll be able to do that. Analogy: back in the day you could just build your own airplane and fly it around. There were no regulations.
Isn't this the logical end goal of basically every approach to "age verification", though? If you really want to control access to the internet, then you can't let people have a VPN or Tor, and if you don't want people to VPNs or Tor then you need to lock the device down.
This will surely fly on hacker news where the prevalent wisdom is to buy your kid an old thinkpad and install Linux.
I agree that schools don’t provide enough challenge to students, so a student could be using the device to actually learn without an alternative, thus confiscating it would be wrong. But I think that would be rare, because I believe most schools today have Chromebooks which can access more than a lifetime’s worth of online resources in any subject, so the student can save whatever they need a thinkpad for at home. And it should be solved by giving those students Chromebooks, not letting other students use their phones during class (if a school confiscates phones but allow thinkpads I think that would also work well enough).