Enshittification

This reads like someone who has a base level understanding of how a chromebook works in an educational environment. Also reads like someone (I'm assuming American) who doesn't know what CIPA is.

I’m on the millennial train here, and am fully onboard with the monopolization angle, but this is taking it a bit far? Chromebooks aren’t that bad.

Stepping back and maybe over generalizing again, I think the problem might be… attention spans? Like kids are so bombarded with feeds and notification spam that, on average, there’s less patience to sit down, look stuff up, and neurotically tinker (which was still the vast minority in my generation). Its the same problem leading to less interest in literature, TV, anything long form.

Learning the bare minimum to function in Windows is not exactly “tech literate” to me, it just happens to be the system so many businesses are stuck with, and some generations were forced to learn by coincidence. Looking back, modern Android and iOS are really accessible by comparison, though of course they have enshittification issues.

Apple did the same thing for the longest time with schools. If you had the interest to fuck with computers you would definitely hack whatever they had. Most schools were not good at IT.

The Chromebook does exactly what it says on the tin. It is a cheap notebook which runs Chrome. And it's fairly competent at that task. It's exactly as advertised. The problem only arises when people think that the ability to use a Chromebook is acceptable as a substitute for the ability to use a normal computer.

It’s this and it’s not. Chromebooks don’t give kids anywhere to explore outside of chrome and handheld devices provide a controlled environment. A lot of kids (and adults!) are operating with a tablet in place of a computer because the most intensive thing they need to do if they’re not gaming is word processing. It’s big tech overall and the internet shrinking down into like 3 companies.

Anyone selling a computer to an institution, like a school or company, it is expected that they will be locked down, especially if the end user isn't technical.

If anything, if google didn't make things locked down and controlled schools would never have bought them and had to worry about debugging the 20 kid's messed up environments.

Kids SHOULD have been tinkering with their own private computers, a laptop from their parents or something like that.

The issue is

1. All tech companies, Google, Apple, Microsoft, are all pushing for users to store their stuff in their clouds instead of locally on their machines and having to worry about their local filesystems, and their local environments.

2. Software as a Service, or much better environment standardization through things like steam means if you want to just use software it usually works without much effort. You don't need to debug bad installs or dive through the installations unless you want to mod things, and even then many things have native mod support so you don't even need to poke through the folder structure or understand how software loading works to run sophisticated mods for most games.

Bruh even before Chromebooks it was only a select few geeks that pursued anything more than word processing.

When I was in school they had Apple II's and pretended using LOGO was learning how to use a computer. Chromebooks are closer to real world computer usage than we've typically had, barring whatever ten-to-fifteen year period where school computers were Windows PCs, which may or may not have happened at all depending on where you live.

The loss of literacy has way more to do with moving from old CLI-based OSs and to GUI OSs and eventually phone and tablet OSs. Not that I'd want to go back to MS-DOS, but the only reason anybody had any understanding of where every part of the OS went and what it did is having to navigate it from memory and it being built from two sticks and three rocks.

Every corporation have a student program. Universities promote corporate products because teachers get money from corporations. But no, blame Google, because they're responsible, it's like saying that IBM was responsible for Hitler. Evil corporations did nothing wrong because evil cannot be changed to good. That's just people who make decisions to put the money on top of morality.

It's tough. No one is supplying hardware below cost and losing money. They're cheap because by offering only a chrome browser, you don't need much hardware. Most everything was headed online anyway because with the advent of Mac popularity, no one wanted to put out little pieces of software for both Windows and Mac.

Chromebooks weren't unpopular at the start just because, they kicked around until the market shifted enough to everything being online and until schoolboards adopted the "laptop for everyone" mentality. Then schoolboards adopted them because they were cheap cheap cheap. I recall a teacher saying they were also good because it meant everyone was on the exact same office suite (google docs). No different versions where the buttons were in different places, no 2010 version, 365 version, whatever. Everyone had the exact same version. Something broken? Factory reset was dead easy. No techs needed.

Monied interests have been destroying education for 4 decades. Google joined the party late, but they’ve certainly done their damage.

They did. They also basically came in around the early 90's in San Francisco and all the tech hippies were like, "Yeah, we're gonna give people all these wonderful tools to create new realities and it's gonna be like a Star Trek utopia!" Then the VC investors and money men showed up and said "No, we're gonna use these tools on people to make them more predictable." So now instead of giving people tools, tech uses tools on people.

Now do cars.

Seeing kids nowadays fail at basic computer stuff is so disheartening.

Man I really need to get the desk for my kid’s PC set up. The machine is already there and got switched to Linux back during the winter.

He will have long creative hyper-focused minecraft build sessions on console, so I bet he’d be pumped to find out he could use the CLI with a keyboard. Or as he calls it, “the commands.”

google practically kinda gave up on improving thier pixel, its just a over-glorified AI phone, which they are obsessed, they dont even compete with the other flagship phones anymore. now alot of tech companies are moving towards Datamining/AI instead of developing.