The laptops in 2026 will all have AI integrated into the hardware. It will be dependent on the AI in the cloud servers.
I think it’s a bit harsh to lay all the blame on google, considering the iPad exists.
Same shit different bucket.
Yeah Apple was pushing their “BSD for morons” laptops om schools long before chromebooks were a thing.
I’d argue the iPad is the bigger offender personally. They’re blaming Chromebooks because that’s often what schools provided, but the same exact timing existed before with iMacs in classrooms all through the 90s and early 00s for millennials despite Windows being by far the more common real world OS they would need to know in the workplace.
But when it comes to portable devices the iPhone and iPad are king, that’s what young people want and often what they’re given. And those operate nearly exactly the same as a Chromebook. Toss everything into a cloud bucket, no user-facing folder structures to learn, everything locked down with limited access and customization. A take it or leave it approach to user interaction.
I have user-facing folder structures on every iOS device I own. What exactly is the extent of your personal experience using iOS?
My experience with iOS devices is mostly non-jailbroken devices, where the file system is not accessible.
What is it you think the Files app is showing you?
A very limited scope of the filesystem instead of exposing the whole thing. Android does the same thing, and so does every system that doesn’t allow the user to have root access.
Not trying to be rude but the files app is absolutely not giving you anything close to full access to your devices file system. It’s an abstraction over the actual file system if anything.
Ohh…the files are in the computer
Yeah there’s a lot more visible just by connecting via USB but it’s still not good.
Thats already more effort than most people will put forth
Just to get this straight: you’re comparing the complexity of using OS X to Chrome OS. I hope you’re not also claiming you’ve actually used both of these?
Edit: also, what do you mean “no user-facing folder structures to learn”? iPadOS I get because even though it has one and has for years, it’s not required. But again: have you ever used Chrome OS?
You’re not wrong. This is just lemmy.
The original commenter compared ipados to chromeos, and they compared osx to windows, I never saw a comparison from osx to chromeos.
The point being made is that modern operating systems often times in the hands of kids (chromeos and ipados) are designed to abstract away much of the underlying elements of the os.
They absolutely compared OS X to Chrome OS by directly comparing what Apple did in the 90s and 00s to what Google did in the 10s. If you take the comment as its own isolated thing, sure; if you understand it as a response to another comment (which it is), then the comparison is smacking you in the face.
What planet am I on right now? Should this conversation be about media literacy instead of tech literacy?
It is rich that you are suggesting this should be about media literacy. How do you connect “what apple did on the 90s” and “what chrome OS did in the 00s” (which it was the 10s, not the 00s) as a direct comparison between operating systems? What the commenter is suggesting is that both google and apple had a hand in making students not prepared to interact with technology, not that they did it in the same way.
I don’t even agree with that statement as I believe being exposed to macs at school (and likely windows at home) woild be beneficial to tech literacy. But you couldn’t even comprehend enough to engage with the point. They were saying macos is not windows, and windows is what kids should be learning. Then you come in and yell and scream about mac being better than chrome.
You were down voted because you were wrong and an asshole
How do you connect “what apple did on the 90s” and “what chrome OS did in the 00s” (which it was the 10s, not the 00s) as a direct comparison between operating systems?
Because they’re directly saying that Apple did with Macintosh what Google did with Chromebooks and that wasn’t a problem for real-world tech literacy.
What the commenter is suggesting is that both google and apple had a hand in making students not prepared to interact with technology, not that they did it in the same way.
Except that they’re using iMacs as a precedent that dumbed-down Chromebooks didn’t (at least substantially) harm tech literacy. My interpretation is somehow a generous one, because the other interpretation is that they’re comparing the iMac being complex but different from the industry standard to Chrome OS being dumbed down. These are two vastly different things.
I comprehended enough: either option is stupid as fuck – just one indicates a lack of evidence while the other indicates a lack of basic logic.
You were down voted because you were wrong […]
I’m wrong? Yeah, I originally said “00s and 10s” for Chrome OS because I thought it came out in 2008, but I looked it up and corrected myself yesterday(?) to just “10s” – completely incidental to the point of my comment. Did you notice too that OS X didn’t exist in the 90s but I called it that anyway for simplicity? No? Oh, that’s right: no one actually gives a shit.
Meanwhile, they’re spouting provable and obvious misinformation about how Chrome OS doesn’t have a user-facing folder system, so I think your explanation for why I was downvoted should leave out “I was wrong”. Clearly the voters didn’t give a shit about factual accuracy. I’m sure the other commenter used Chrome OS enough to judge it when they’re saying that. Weird how you didn’t address the part of my comment correcting transparent misinformation.
You were down voted because you were […] an asshole
I was an asshole. And any mixture of “wrong” and “an asshole” gets blind upvotes on Lemmy all the time. No, what got me downvotes is that Lemmy doesn’t have Reddit’s hidden votes feature that stops a cascade of morons blindly downvoting anything that’s at negative (I was at +2, -23 when I made my second edit; just acknowledging that blind, uncritical downvoting took that ratio from ~1:11 to ~1:3). And I’ll continue being a condescending asshole until this Lemmy equivalent of boomers giving one star to businesses they’ve never been to – because Google asked them to rate their experience – is dead.
Have a nice day.
Based on this small exchange it seems like you erect straw men to knock down to inflate your intellectual self worth which is incredibly fragile based on how much you freaked out over a tiny correction that I didn’t use at all in my argument.
If you are actually interested in engaging with the topic try harder to read what I have said
Huh? I used ChromeOS and Mac OS for work, study and play and I can’t honestly say one is particularly more simplistic or even user-friendly (dumbed-down) than the other. But ChromeOS is significantly less locked down overall in that getting root access on the device is much, much simpler.
- The thing about root access is just objectively untrue. These are the steps to gain root access on macOS as provided by Apple. Meanwhile, I can find no official tutorial from Google, and more importantly, enabling developer mode wipes your Chromebook. I legitimately cannot imagine what on god’s green Earth you did to make the macOS process more painstaking than wiping your device.
- Even if your premise weren’t demonstrably untrue, this isn’t a discussion about what you can theoretically do with a device; it’s about the kind of workflow the device would encourage for a typical student using it. In this regard, a Chromebook is massively dumbed down. Sure you might dip into the downloads folder, but Chrome OS by design encourages the use of web apps as much as humanly possible and severely restricts your ability and incentives to meaningfully interact with your OS outside of a browser.
- Even assuming that the process of gaining root access mattered to this discussion (it categorically doesn’t), what you can and cannot do with that root access would matter far more, and in that unrelated discussion, macOS clearly still wins out (unless you’d want to argue that developer mode lets you install Linux, at which point this is no longer about Chrome OS).
Meanwhile, I can find no official tutorial from Google
This is such an unserious strawman of an argument, how do you not get embarrassed writing this?
There’s no official tutorial for most Android devices either, it doesn’t mean it’s harder to do than on Apple devices.
Even if your premise weren’t demonstrably untrue
Just saying something is so doesn’t make it so, to demonstrate my premise is untrue you have to actually demonstrate how it’s untrue, which you have not done.
it’s about the kind of workflow the device would encourage for a typical student using it
You mean like how Mac OS is locked to the Mac OS App Store by default only, featuring mainly proprietary payware unless you toggle an obscure bypass in the settings, while ChromeOS lets you run any unsigned code for ChromeOS, Linux and Android with minimal effort, all of which are either fully or partially open source and comes with a web browser equipped with a nice set of easily accessible Dev tools, which allows you to examine and learn how web applications are written, architectured and deployed - the largest by far aspect of computer science and software development most people come into contact with regularly?
Even if the conversation was about what you say, you would still be wrong. But it’s not about that, because in a school scenario both would be locked down with an MDM - in Apple’s case literally via serial numbers and network connectivity DRM you can’t realistically block.
And no, this conversation is actually not about that either. A user repairable device doesn’t become less repairable if it discourages your 12 year old from popping out and eating the battery.
severely restricts your ability and incentives to meaningfully interact with your OS outside of a browser.
Any examples on this one, chief? Or you just saying things like that will magically make them true again?
Even assuming that the process of gaining root access mattered to this discussion (it categorically doesn’t),
Of course it does. Really it’s the thing that matters the most.
Sorry but your bailey castle isn’t any more secure than your motte, because access to root is actual freedom over your device, anything less than actual unrestricted root access where I can say, replace the network stack or write and add my own kernel modules for hardware support I want to add or whatever reason I please is by definition not really software (and by extension hardware) I have control over. It’s just another blackbox walled garden.
what you can and cannot do with that root access would matter far more, and in that unrelated discussion, macOS clearly still wins out
Again, do you have any evidence at all to back that up?
And what’s with this weird caveat?
(unless you’d want to argue that developer mode lets you install Linux, at which point this is no longer about Chrome OS).
It’s some real specious reasoning to handwave the most core freedom of all - to simply replace/refuse the OS altogether and bring your own to your hardware, and highly convenient of course because Apple employs many anti-repair, anti-consumer, anti-modification practices from the very screws to their knock-off TPM (T2?) chip to hardware whitelists where everything is married down to the cables and each and every module for no reason other than to maintain control above all.
Please apply more intellectual rigor next time.
Fuck Google and fuck Apple, stop defending them, don’t die on this silly hill and go be free.
Have you even been reading this thread? This is about the level of tech literacy kids get from using an OS for school, not about what you’re theoretically capable of doing. Yes, you’re right, root access on both macOS and Chrome OS would be locked out in a school setting. That makes your braindead argument a non-starter for this discussion. Even if what you said about the rooting difficulty were true (again, showed it isn’t), it could not possibly matter less here. And yes, I am going to say that official, step-by-step documentation that takes a few minutes at most to follow is easier than following some third-party website and then resetting your entire OS.
Even in a situation where it’s not locked down, neckbeards like you and I are in the vanishingly small minority of users who ever touch root access; when we’re talking about generations of people being raised to be tech-illiterate, root access has fuck-all to do with that. Unless the OS is incentivizing average users to use root access enough that a sizable portion actually would (desktop Linux and nothing else), then a comparison of which OS gives easier root access couldn’t be less relevant when talking about an entire generation of kids.
Here, Chrome OS is meaningfully much worse than OS X for teaching kids tech literacy on the grounds that the average user experience is dumbed down to hell. Meanwhile:
Fuck Google and fuck Apple, stop defending them
Literally where? I’ve done nothing but lambast Chrome OS this entire thread except to correctly point out that it has user-facing folders which you do often interact with. Apple? By correctly pointing out that the Apple desktop ecosystem is massively less dumbed-down than Chrome OS, I’m defending them? Dude, I use Linux and Android (the latter begrudgingly; locked bootloader) and would never purchase an Apple product again for the foreseeable future; next time, save your sweaty, mouth-foaming screed about Apple bad for when you actually find someone who likes and supports Apple.
I ain’t reading all that.
You are angry asf and need to chill tf out, restating your points over and over doesn’t make them true, but it does make you sound like an aggro troglodyte.
You need to back up your shit and learn to formulate actual arguments, not just arbitrary statements you keep repeating. Stop being an aggressively incorrect moron and start thinking.
Neckbeards Mouth-foaming screed Braindead
Speak for yourself bruh.
Anyway, it’s not very hard to understand:
Root access = control of device, control of device = ability to experiment. Ability to experiment = potential for tech literacy. Potential for tech literacy = tech literacy
Mac OS = locked down and dumbed down = tech illiteracy Chrome OS = Linux with chrome = tech literacy.
Also, blocked.
Probably not so much that you’re wrong as you just sound like a condescending dick.
No smarm this time: my question was 100% genuine. I actually don’t know how you can use these operating systems and draw those conclusions. This feels like they ate someone else’s half-baked opinions left out overnight, got food poisoning, and threw them up into this comment.
Also, in my opinion, being condescending is the correct response to people confidently spewing complete, easily disprovable bullshit. I confidently get things wrong sometimes too, but I’m getting really sick of this “I’m qualified to speak on everything” culture that social media is exacerbating.
Also, the total number of Chromebooks sold worldwide is tiny compared with phones and tablets. Most kids have probably never seen a Chromebook, but virtually every kid has held and used a phone, a tablet or both.
If you want to blame Google, blame Android, not Chromebooks.
It is more basic than that:
“It just works” is terrible for developing computer skills.
It is damned convenient for the most part, but it removes the opportunity to have an issue and solve it, developing your troubleshooting skills.
Then we come to the lack of verbosity of modern operating systems and programs.
“Oops, there is an issue, please wait while we solve it…” is an absolutely terrible error message.
“Error 0x001147283b - Fatal error” is a far better error message.
Until you search that error code and it doesn’t tell you anything useful.
Then you ask on a forum and others can help you easier
I agree with the the sentiment of your comment, but I think both error codes aren’t great.
I want error logs or descriptions, not a cryptic code that the Company selling the OS can choose not to document publicly.
Error codes are fantastic, even undocumented codes gives users the ability to coordinate on forums and blogs to figure out the issue in a far easier manner
I can google one of these on another device and figure out what it means and at least attempt to fix it. “Something went wrong :(” helps fucking no one
Have you ever worked in an environment powered by Windows-based computers, and Microsoft software? Have you ever spoken with any user in such an environment about their experience with errors like the ones you described, and how easy or difficult it was to solve them?
I am not doing the whole passive aggressive argument where you refuse to say what your issue is and hold a clear conversation so you can try and seem like the winner and claim that I am an idiot because you have misunderstood my comment.
But to answer the specific questions posted:
Have you ever worked in an environment powered by Windows-based computers, and Microsoft software?
Yes, it has been my job for fifteen years.
Have you ever spoken with any user in such an environment about their experience with errors like the ones you described, and how easy or difficult it was to solve them?
Not only do I speak with them several times a workday, I am usually the one solving said problems meaning I get to experience it all.
My point stands, I don’t even see yours.
Fair enough, and I appreciate the clarification. That actually reinforces my point. You and I both work with people who use Windows daily and encounter these verbose errors—but they almost never understand them. They don’t use these messages to develop troubleshooting skills—they just get stuck and frustrated.
So while I get the appeal of a detailed error message in theory, in practice, it doesn’t help most users learn anything. If anything, it just creates more dependency on people like us to fix things for them.
Thank you for accepting my initial rant, I am all for a proper discussion.
I get what you mean, and while true that most people won’t get better at troubleshooting because of a verbose error message, even back in the Windows 95/98 days where you had verbose error messages, most people would still not be capable of understanding them, myself included at that time.
But my point is that the small minority of people who would start troubleshooting the stuff, myself included these days, would be vastly more helped by a verbose error message than a generic “Whops! Something went wrong, please wait!”
Modern software are not even giving people the same initial chances to troubleshoot the issue as older software did.
Oh, on that I totally agree. And not just with Microsoft with everything I run into Microsoft is especially bad because their attitude seems to we need to do something. You don’t need to know what it is and we’re not gonna tell you how long it takes so just fuck right off Which is monumentally annoying of course Apple does give a bunch of code and stuff for errors when something goes wrong and you can send it the developers, and I have never taken the time to try to figure out what any of that stuff is because I am not gonna be able to fix whatever it is and so I’m not gonna take the time. However, in my line of work where I’m supervising a lot of file ingestion people, data, architects, and software engineers, it definitely behooves me to understand what the errors I’m seeing with our own in-house proprietary products are. It’s especially frustrating when some of the higher up software engineers want to exclude me from meetings about the products going down because they claim it’s too technical for me. It’s not, of course, it’s not even the real reason; they just want to exclude me because they’re afraid of sharing their weaknesses or something. I have completely figured out what they are worried about yet, but it’s maddening.
Ya know they make a valid point. Part of the learning experience growing up and going to school in the 90s and early 00s was figuring out how to bypass the school’s restrictions with proxies, or how to load Quake 2 onto every computer in the district so we could sneak and have little impromptu LAN parties, etc. Hell, one of us got caught hacking into the student records portal to change his grades and after he graduated they hired the kid to work in the IT department. He works for a local ISP now.
Nowadays they don’t know how to use a computer, they just know how to click icons and get apps from sanctioned app stores.
I don’t know where people get this idea from. Kids are still hacking their school computers, just as much as we were back in the 90s. If anything, kids are more knowledgeable on bypassing these systems now than we were then; ask any school’s IT admin, kids are doing wild shit with their computers and tablets.
Don’t forget, people like you and I weren’t “normal kids”. We were a very stark minority. That’s still the case with today’s kids. I think you’re just not seeing it because you either don’t have children in your life that you are in regular communication with, or aren’t present on the social platforms today’s kids are on.
Basically this. None of our parents knew we were dumpster diving telephone exchanges or trying to figure out gaining root on server systems. Today’s underground is equally obfuscated by the “don’t tell the grown ups” as we were.
And at the same time large sections of them are as tech illiterate as the boomers. There is a huge divide between the ones hacking everything and those that have only ever used an iPad or similar cloud-based devices and don’t understand how even basics like folder structures works. And they sit right next to each other at school day after day in the same general classes.
That was the case when I was a teen, too
How many kids are you exposed to? I think you’ve made up quite a story with a giant brush here.
I don’t work with kids children, but that’s not what I claimed either, I was talking about Zoomers being as tech illiterate as the Boomers. I work frontline IT support, so everyone down to those right out of high school and entering the workforce at a business with locations statewide. So firmly working with Gen Z entering the workforce now and through the last decade. Current Zoomer ages range from about 13-28, I’d say that’s enough time and breadth to have a relatively decent sample size for an unscientific comparison like this.
I’ve managed MSP teams supporting 1000 ish users.
You’re just letting biases affect your perception. The vast majority of adults use osx and Windows just fine.
don’t understand how even basics like folder structures works.
Why would they, though? The average user in today’s world doesn’t need that knowledge, just as we didn’t need the knowledge of how punchcards worked (although I think there are a few Lemmings around here who may actually be old enough to qualify). We needed to know how folders work, because that was the norm during our upbringing, but that’s no longer the case.
We didn’t stick to our predecessors’ methodologies. Neither will our successors. They’ll evolve and grow beyond the technology and the norms that we’re familiar with, just as we did with the generation before us.
The average user in today’s world doesn’t need that knowledge.
That’s just factually not true for anyone that works in a medium to large company. Folder structures and network drives are how all company data is handled. The only people at any of our business locations that don’t need to know how that works are the environmental services and food and beverage employees. The rest of the employees absolutely use basic knowledge like that every single day. And not needing that definitely doesn’t apply to any IT adjacent profession, which have expanded dramatically since I was in school.
Folder structures and network drives are how all company data is handled.
Eh, kinda of, but modern enterprise document storage is largely evolving away from it for general business users. I say this as an IT professional that has been an active consumer of the evolution over the last 25 years. Yes, SMB/CIFs/NFS shares still exist in the corporate enterprise, but modern enterprise systems are doing document storage more in Sharepoint, Google Drive, or even object form (storage buckets). All of these last three don’t use a traditional file system where folder (directory really) navigation is a required skill.
This is especially true with Google drive. Yes, there are folders, but its equally likely that the file you need isn’t even in your folders because its been shared to you by another user from one of their folders. Links, bookmarks, and free text file searches are often more useful for locating document that navigating a traditional directory tree. This is somewhat true in Sharepoint too.
Edit: This came off intensely aggressive. Sorry.
I’m looking down the barrel of a massive project to shift all of our departments away from network shares to SharePoint. Simultaneously, my team is going to stop supporting “special” permissioned sub-folders, like share/Facilities/Managers/ so people can’t see their co-worker’s yearly review. Each Sharepoint site’s “owner” (read, department manager) will be responsible for access management in their own site.
Also, knowing some of these departments, they will absolutely run up against the limit on amount of files in a single Sharepoint site. My boss seems to refuse to believe that’s possible.
This is going to be such a clusterfuck. I am afraid.
Original comment:
Sincerely: How the fuck are your users utilizing Sharepoint that they don’t need to navigate the file/folder structure concept? Just using the search bar every time? Maintaining a list of shortcuts or browser favorites?
How does a file being shared from another user’s storage invalidate the need to still know how to get to it?
I can’t speak to Google Drive, as I’ve only used that minorly as an end user. Object based storage is an entirely different use case than document/data organization.
File names and tags with shit chucked in what is effectively a root folder are not adequate for most companies’ data organization and “securing so only the right people have access” needs.
Sincerely: How the fuck are your users utilizing Sharepoint that they don’t need to navigate the file/folder structure concept? Just using the search bar every time? Maintaining a list of shortcuts or browser favorites?
How does a file being shared from another user’s storage invalidate the need to still know how to get to it?
Users are horrible at file management, but you know this part already. When your users have fully evolved away from SMB/NFS shares to Google Drive or Sharepoint it works like this:
User1: “Can you update the financials for your project for this quarter in the file QuarterReporter?”
User2: “Yeah absolutely, where is QuaterReporter?”
User1: “Its in the Reports folder, but theres a few version of it. Don’t use QuaterReporterV1. Use QuaterReporterV1-restored_02-02-23”. Thats one we maintain with current data in it. Here’s the link to the file."
User2: “Uhh, I clicked on that link but don’t have access to it. Can you grant it?”
User1: “Oh sure, let me add you to the doc. There, try it now”
User2: “Yep, that worked. Okay do you just need the financials update one time or would you like me to do that for each quarter ongoing?”
User1: “Ongoing please”
User2: “Okay, I’ll bookmark this file then and use it again in 3 months. Hey, my financials only cover the top of the project, do you want the tactical detail too?”
User1: “I do actually, yes.”
User2: “Okay add, Jim Smith to the doc, and I’ll forward the link you gave of the file to him.”So yes, the file still lives in a folder somewhere, users often don’t even have the right permissions to maintain the folder structure properly and they just route around that by ignoring it and using links, bookmarks, and email forwards of links.
Corporate employee here, can confirm. Now you just turn on auto save and forget about it.
So kids with iphones just download every photo, video, and song they have to one folder and have no way to sort it?
Basically, yeah. Chronological sorting is good enough for most people. As long as you remember when you took the photo, you can find it easily.
Jesus that sounds horrendous. I do the same thing with my phone camera out of laziness, and that’s bad enough. I can’t imagine every file I have being accessible based on my memory of timeline.
I do this on purpose. I much much prefer chronological sorting and metadata search than actually organising files as long as it’s faster and works correctly.
Even with actually manually organized file storage ultimately I just end up with folders more based on chronology than anything else.
The way I see it - the only actually practical reason to have folders is if there is logic applied to the files, like e.g. all files in folder X get mounted as a docker volume in program Y or backed up to server Z etc etc.
Beyond that all I care about is that my files are actually appropriately indexed and accessible quickly on-demand exactly when I want and how I want both at work and at home.
Same way how I don’t actually go to /bin/ and list the dir and find the program, I hit Win+D in i3 and just type in what I want to run and get the program.
My one pet peeve though is when devs use this to organise an app’s files like a tornado organizes a goddamn county fair, my ~/ is chock-full of random dotfiles and dotfolders of dotfiles without clear purpose or use and the state of C:\Users\whatever is a lovecraftian horror once you had the same general use Windows install for a few years, god forbid making sense of AppData and whatnot. And it gets so much worse with distro standards evolving to conf.d folders rather than one dotfile per program/daemon which just makes it hard to get an accurate full picture of things.
Fucking Kali of all things is such a bitch for adding
splashto boot prams outside of /etc/default/grub in its goddamn theme script of all places. I use this OS for pentesting practice/learning (and gaming). I do not want fancy boot. I do not want arbitrary, potentially crippling boot options silently added to my grub in files that have no business doing so or really even being a default inclusion no matter how ‘pretty’ and ‘modern’ the result. I am trying to learn deobfuscating JS, not my own goddamn configs, not that the latter isn’t useful but it feels hostile and anti-human to sacrifice simplicity for elegance.
Google provided Chromebooks below cost to schools… for profit. Gotcha screenshot person, great point.
My sibling in Talos, are you entirely unfamiliar with the concepts of ‘loss leaders’, ‘rent seeking/Software as a Service’ and ‘hooking them while they’re young’?
Every single one of those is common place in the digital world these days, and this is no exception. By getting these devices in the hands of kids for less than the cost of the device, you can affect what services they choose to use in the future (by making them already familiar with your product by the time they can choose for themselves) and setting them up to live in your walled garden and making them pay a premium to say in (see also, the Apple model).
Oh yes, because without the Chromebook, people would stop Googling stuff. Are you familiar with the concepts of “context” and “numbers matter”?
Also, Google doesn’t even have a walled garden, in fact their products barely work together.
Chromebooks very intentionally push people toward Google drive and Google one for subscription services, and all of the rest of gsuite for data mining. I’m not saying chromebooks are inherently this evil master plan, but don’t discount just how much they do push profitable services for Google.
Google drive has no lock in. You can take your data an move it to a nas, Dropbox or one drive any time. Holy conspiracies batman.
I never said there was lock-in, they just do the same thing every other tech giant does nowadays and makes their “products” all integrated to steer people toward them. Chromebooks have native gdrive integration in the file manager. Gsuite apps all come pinned and pre-installed. It, for a long time, had no way to run a browser other than chrome, which itself has all sorts of integrations through your Google acct. That all serves to steer people toward staying in the Google ecosystem and avoid trying to reach out of it if they don’t have prior motives toward that.
Staying == lock in. You can have a chomebook without paying a cent to Google after the initial purchase, and leave at any point without hassle. I have no idea how is that a loss leader or anything of the sort.
The truth is that Google doesn’t sell them below cost and not everything is a conspiracy.
Chromebooks fucked a generation of kids? Kids got cheap, hard to break, up to date, easy to replace laptops which ran a full desktop and even offered a Linux and android subsystem. Certainly not perfect but better than alternatives like the iPad or Windows S.
I agree, and I think it takes almost MAGA level self-absorption to contrive this interpretation of events. What actually happened was somebldy wanted to sell products and came up with products people wanted. And that’s not an all-encompassing endorsement of Google and everything Google has ever done because I’m “on Google’s side”, it’s a criticism of OP’s imagination.
I don’t believe that.
It’s likely because the market has consolidated to a small number of companies who can dictate the means of production and how their consumers interact with their product.
When the personal computer market was young, entries from all sorts of manufacturers flooded in. Some failed, some succeeded. Everything had to be configured by the user because universal standards hadn’t been developed yet. This allowed for some people to be exposed to the back end, which have them some understanding of how their technology worked. It enhanced problem solving skills.
If anything, 'Plug and Play" probably had more involvement in enshittification than Google. Taking out the problem solving and moving the goal to consumption.
This is kinda a bad take imo. I don’t think it’s chrome books that has ruined tech literacy. Maybe it’s younger exposure to even more addictive social media than previous generations?
I’m pretty young. My first mobile device was an iPod touch 4th gen. I figured out how to jailbreak it and I was like 12 at the time. If I ever felt one of these walled garden devices was holding me back, I enjoyed finding a creative solution around that. Since that iPod touch, I jailbroke my Wii and recently a kindle. I also modded a gameboy, but that was different than jailbreaking.
Yeah it’s a fucking abysmal take. More kids had access to the internet and computers because of Chromebooks, without them they’d have had nothing - maybe once an hour in the computer lab each week, assuming they even had one.
Prior to Chromebooks, the most a school could do was “a computer in every classroom”. That was it, that was the ambition in the early 2000’s and even then most schools failed.
What happened was tech companies made computers easier to use by hiding a lot of that complexity. And average humans were fine with that because shit should just work.
The arguments being raised here about a loss of skills are the same arguments boomers used against millennials because they didn’t know how to do DIY and shit like that.
The blame is always squarely on the education system. That system is supposed to set kids up with the skills they need to make it in the wold and tech literacy is one of many, many areas that is hugely underserved.
Before Chromebooks we had one aging computer lab that the entire school had to reserve and share. Kids never even learned to type. I was able to improve students typing ability before they hit High School.
Because we had Chromebooks (that I raised money for with fundraisers) my students were able to learn to use digital data logging of science experiments using probes, my students were able to learn to design websites, I was able to teach them programming basics using Scratch, I was able teach kids basic IT management since I created a team of kids to assist with tech problems students and teachers had with their technology. I taught them CAD with TinkerCAD, I taught them video editing, I taught them image editing, etc.
Chromebooks were amazing.
were fine with that because shit should just work.
This was Apple’s literal marketing campaign when they were trying to make Macs popular again
And say what you will about apple, it worked (the slogan, not the Macs)
What are the advantages of a jailbroken kindle? I’ve thought about it but there isn’t really anything I lack on mine.
My motivation was mostly to ditch Amazon, but in the process I discovered ko reader is both better than Amazon’s reader and does a really good job turning PDFs into readable books.
Not to mention that Chromebooks are Linux (so can be modded for basically anything), but these days have official native support for sideloading any Linux distro you please. All it takes is a flashed USB drive and one button click, then you’re totally unrestricted and out of ChromeOS.
If any kid wanted to, they could do that far easier than I could when I was in school. If they become adults, buy a Chromebook, and choose to do nothing with it other than watch YouTube, then it has absolutely nothing to do with the technology that was provided to them during school.
The school doesn’t let you do that. Because if you installed Linux you could install games, and then you might get distracted. Never mind the fact that YouTube is still completely available.
I looked into this back when I was in school and there was some weird workaround found by someone on reddit that essentially forced it to do a complete factory reset. I didn’t want to get in trouble for doing that, and if I did that I wouldn’t have been able to connect to the wifi anymore.
official native support for sideloading any Linux distro you please.
I thought you had to remove a write protect screw and flash a custom firmware.
Have they stopped that now?
I jailbroke my Wii
Yeah I’ve done this too. Beyond easy. There’s literally a website with step-by-step instructions. I imagine it’s the same for Kindle, etc.
Googling how to jailbreak something is not the same as having an open and functional development environment.
You don’t need to have a dev environment in order to be considered “tech literate”.
Just as a single example, an issue I’ve seen is that kids may not even understand what a file system is or how it works, because they’re used to apps like Facebook or Google Drive which abstract away from the concept of a hard-drive, a User folder, file extensions, etc. Then they grow up putting photos on instagram, writing essays on Microsoft Word, and to them it’s some unexplained internet magic. They never had first-hand experience with creating and modifying files on a local file system, and so they lack the understanding of what’s going on behind the scenes.
may not even understand what a file system is or how it works … which abstract away from the concept of a hard-drive, a User folder, file extensions, etc.
What’s funny is, filesystems, folders, file extensions are already abstractions, there is nothing inherently “right” about those particular abstractions, it’s just what we’ve used for 40 some years… Before that, you might just have blocks on a disk, or a linear stream on a tape, and it was up to you to figure out what went where, and how to find it again. Point being, it’s all just a sea of bits, regardless of how you organize them- the goal is to organize them in a way that you can forget the sea of bits.
What did you jailbreak your ipod with, though? Was it a chromebook?
Probably windows 🤮
I think there were jailbreaks that could be done on device, but if I remember correctly this wasn’t one of them. I forget the exact year/iOS version. I wanna say I jailbroke 3 iOS versions in a row, and at that point new things had captured my interest. Eventually I found myself captivated with frontend development.
You can find my latest work at https://blorpblorp.xyz/, the obviously best client for Lemmy and soon PieFed.
So you had access to a fairly open device, where the system was considerably less restrictive than a Chromebook. Apparently many first time users don’t have that luxury any longer. They’re stuck with phones and chromebooks (phones with a keyboard slapped on, really). Good luck hacking anything with that locked up shit.
Someone else pointed out it’s not that difficult to boot Linux on your Chromebook off a thumb drive. A quick search shows it might be slightly complicated but seems pretty doable depending on your model.
Listen I hate Google, but this still seems like a dumb take. There are better things to criticize them for: illegal monopolization of search through anticompetitive practices, making their search product worse on purpose, having no respect for people’s privacy, literally removing their slogan to not be evil, etc).
I just see it as another item on a long list.
Steve jobs is mot blameless here.
But yes.
Finally someone who is sane & smart
Not with chrimebooks, with android
This is an incredibly dumb take. Tech isn’t one dimensional and there isn’t a “right” path to tech literacy. I grew up on Windows and I learned a lot of what I know by exploring my laptops and learning new things out of necessity. I ended majoring in CS in working in tech. My sister, who’s 5 years younger than me, had Chromebooks growing up both at home and at school, yet she’s also a very proficient CS major. Using Chromebooks doesn’t show that someone is bad at tech, that’s just a baseless assumption.
Chromebooks are just another branch of tech, and there’s really nothing wrong with them. They’re basically Android tablets in laptop form. Google giving them to schools at a deeply discounted price is not a bad thing. Without them, many schools wouldn’t have any sort of tech for their kids to work with. Chromebooks are incredibly useful tools that can enable teachers to incorporate material from the internet into their lessons and help streamline their work.
Hating on things for the sake of hating on them is just lazy and counterproductive. There’s a lot to criticize Google for, Chromebooks are not one of them.
Not Android, Linux. I was trying to figure out why there are so few Android tablets and read that Google didn’t have complete control with Android. That’s why Samsung and HTC and others put their own overlay on it. They didn’t want that for laptops/bigger devices, so for ChromeOS they locked it down and told the hardware manufacturers “no, it’s ChromeOS. You can’t fiddle with it. If you want to make Chromebooks, these are the minimum specs and this is the keyboard you must use. If not, fuck off.”
Being a CS major (even a good one) isn’t a solid measure of tech literacy. CS still suffers from the “do this arbitrary thing so you can get credit” that other majors and American schooling suffers from.
Actually I’ve seen first hand the dumbing down of curriculum in my CS program via my younger peers’s stories, and helping them with their coursework. And it’s 100% due to low tech literacy.
These kind of takes have the usual format of “anything a company does is bad” and is profit driven. They forget that there is something called marketing and optics behind it.
So the argument is that because Chromebooks just work and don’t need troubleshooting unlike windows so this is Googles fault
OK
No, the argument is that Chromebooks are so limited in what they can offer that kids never learned to do anything out of using the chrome browser.
Turns out you don’t need to worry about troubleshooting something if you just remove that functionality lol
Most Chromebooks offered Linux on them. Even Linus Torvalds used a Chromebook when travelling to develop via it. Presumably because he was sick to death of “troubleshooting” when he had other, better things to do. And presumably schools and teachers also have better things to do than deal with bs like conflicting packages, missing drivers, viruses or whatever on every kid’s device.
You are correct that most chromebooks can have Linux installed on them.
I don’t think that’s relevant in a discussion about Chromebooks in a school setting - were schools encouraging their students to install Linux?
Doesn’t matter if they encourage it or, not, the option is there. So if kids want to mess around, compile stuff, run Linux games they can totally do it. The main purpose of the laptop however would be to do work, save / submit stuff to the cloud, run all day and be cheap so if it gets stolen or broken it’s less expense to replace. I think in that role the Chromebook is the best solution anyone came up with. And there were a long line of contenders.
Is the option actually there, as in it’s allowed by school policy? Would you be able to show an example confirming this?
I highly doubt a school IT department would be okay with this. The very post were discussing asserts that it was marketed to schools as something that can be locked down.
I’d also argue that even if it was allowed, whether or not it was encouraged undoubtedly matters.
These are kids we’re talking about, not engineers. Additionally, were discussing technical competence at the generational level, so we’d have to rule out outliers, which I’d handily believe “kids who installed linux on their school Chromebooks” would fall under.
I don’t have my Chromebook to hand but I believe the setting is in the Prefs. When you set up Linux it’s a virtualized Debian that you can pretty much do anything with but it can’t mess with ChromeOS outside. Not all Chromebooks support it since it’s space / CPU dependent but if it does then it’s Linux. I was even running graphical apps since the screen is a Wayland server.
All Chromebooks ARE Linux. ChromeOS is a Linux based operating system. Whether or not you can get to the lower level is a different discussion. I had one of the first Chromebooks, you have always been able to root them and do what you want with them.
A certain group of Boomer-brains are heavily invested in the idea that Millennials are the only generation that knows how to use computers.
So we’ve been seeing a lot of “blame the X for the Y” agitprop that’s increasingly divorced from reality. It’s just the next generation of outrage porn, tailored towards the current generation of 40 year olds.
FOX News ran the same bullshit content for GenXers and Boomers.
They don’t need to know how computers work if Chromebooks are the only thing in existence.
They also don’t need to know how to deal with python dependencies if they can pace their code into AI and say why isn’t tkinter working?
Craftsmrn said the same thing about the industrial revolution.
That’s honestly technology in a nutshell. Technological development leads to further abstraction, leading to less low level knowledge. It’s always been this way. Is AI an abstraction step too far, or are we just the next generation of old man yelling at cloud?
I asked myself that question a lot.
When cloud first became a thing I yelled at the cloud a lot. Then I got on board with provisioning. And they stepped up the game with load balancers that actually have features security groups SSL unwrapping.
No I realize that one person with a cloud account can do the work of three or four of system engineers.
If you know what you’re doing, you can definitely do this hybrid of vibe coding and real coding. You can’t just give it a problem and tell it to solve it you need to tell it exactly what you’re expecting it to do. Occasionally you can ask it if it has any suggestions and it’ll come back with something that you didn’t think of that’s not a half bad idea.
That said, there’s a lot of idiots out there with zero skill just vibr coating stuff they have no business doing leaving vulnerabilities and caution to the wind.
Before AI we used to refer to the “vibe coders” as “script kiddies”. People who would find a chunk of code and apply it to a job without really knowing what it did.
Fine when they were working alone and what they were up to wasn’t your problem. But as soon as you got into a team project, the code base would start filling up with these patchwork, confused, inefficient solutions to systemic problems.
You’d have the same bug in three different places and you’d have to run down the flaw over and over again, because someone was just copypasta-ing a solution wherever it would fit.
You know how you know even less about computers? When you cannot afford one at all
That’s why they only know what Chromebook offers, they have them in school.
My kid’s school doesn’t have any kind of computer instruction, no computer lab, it’s all Chromebooks.
Is it your genuine belief that your schools would have computer instruction and big easily accessible labs if not for Chromebooks?
I remember “teach kids computers” as an educational panacea during the 80s/90s. It made Micheal Dell very rich, but often at the expense of the biology, chemistry, and physics lab programs. “Nobody knows how to use a blowtorch / dissect an animal / build an engine anymore” was a refrain I heard all the through my high school years.
Has eliminating computer labs brought back the old 70s era Space Race science programs? Or are we still just boiling away ever ounce of the public system that costs money (except athletics, of course)?
I was simply stating why the kids only know Chromebooks. Many poor communities, mine and myself included, have households that don’t have computers at home.
The schools give each kid a Chromebook at the beginning of the year. So it’s the only computer access these kids get.
There isn’t instruction on how PCs work on a base level in my kids middle school, and no computer lab to experiment with. So they only know how to navigate Chromebooks, because that’s their access level
And I mean, They got rid of home economics for the computer lab back when I was a kid. I don’t understand why you brought up the 70s or whatever, I’m aware times and education instruction changes sure, you don’t need to be rude.
The schools give each kid a Chromebook at the beginning of the year. So it’s the only computer access these kids get.
Plenty of kids have access to desktops and laptops through their parents. Libraries also have computer labs with traditional PCs.
There isn’t instruction on how PCs work on a base level in my kids middle school
I’ve never heard of a school that provided middle school computer education outside of small elective classes, and even those only in wealthier districts.
I don’t know many of my son’s peers, who do have a pc at home.
I had computer instruction in middle school while attending a title 1 rural school. Idk
Maybe both things are true. Wasn’t trying to argue or “be proven wrong” just stating why many children may only know Chromebook use, and it’s not thier fault
I’ll come off it. I know plenty of 30 and 40-year-olds who are utterly incapable of performing the most basic of tasks on a computer. By your logic they should not have an issue since they grew up with Windows.
Some people are just really stupid and have zero interest in educating themselves.
Ah yes, a vast increase in the accessibility of computers actually made people less tech literate. This whole “gen-z can’t computer like me” crap is just millennials entering into their juvenoia phase. I guess we’re all just damned to become boomers, old and scared.
I think it’s a legitimate concern. For car ownership, even after it became mainstream, people had a rough idea of how cars worked. There was an engine, brakes, tires, etc.
With computers, I don’t think the average user has that same level of understanding. I could do some basic diagnosis if my car broke down, people can’t do that on their computer.
Granted it’s more abstract and changes more frequently than a car, but I think the average users is capable of learning basic debuging and should if they’re on a computer or smartphone for a large fraction of their day. We just don’t ask that if them and hermetically seal computer systems.
Ehh in the same way boomers claim millennials are dumb because they can’t fix everything about their cars themselves, millennials complain that gen z is dumb because they can’t do everything with computers themselves. In both cases the underlying argument is flawed. Each generation is just as capable as the last it’s just the skills that are more useful to each changes over time. The reality is learning how to rip and burn a cd isn’t as important to know how to do now as it was 20 years ago. Same as knowing how to change your own oil isn’t as important as it used to be.
I’d say both sets of skills are still important.
You can just say you didn’t understand my comment
This seems silly. Lots of kids never learned about computers even when they were available. A chromebook was just an electronic school aid. If the interest was in computers they would learn about computers.
I think this is a fairly dumb take. In the schools that I saw that had chromebooks a kid might be taking English, Math, AND computing. It really was up to the school (and parents) to introduce computing, not the machine that was the general replacement for books.
The real take is to get kids into PC gaming from a young age. Kids are super patient with each other and now my kid is doing things like installing mods for games that he plays. It’s also massively improved his reading which is mostly how I learned English myself.
I can thank Minecraft for making me learn how to use the computer because I wanted to install mods and for learning English because Minecraft let’s plays were like crack to 10 year old me and basically all of them were in English
Probably a great way to get them comfortable with pc hardware too - want that new GPU? Here you go. Install it, you just get the one so be careful and learn how to do it right.
I probably wouldn’t let my son install a GPU until he’s a bit older just because of the cost lol but it is simple enough for a teenager to do, I think.
