I think it's a bit harsh to lay all the blame on google, considering the iPad exists.

Same shit different bucket.

First of all, this isn't enshitification as defined by Corey Doctorow. This has nothing to do with an internet platform getting worse because the priorities of the proprietors changed.

I don't think it's entirely fair to blame Google for this. None of these companies do this for entirely altruistic reasons. At the core of the problem is funding in education. Google saw an opportunity and jumped on it. When given a choice that kids get no computer hardware vs. dumping price Chromebooks I would still vote Chromebook. Get your politicians to set aside less money for tanks and more money for education.

Besides, no one is stopping kids from exploring other platforms. Google is looking for an infrastructure lock-in, get them locked in while they are young, but you can go do other stuff. It's also a question of financial means and interests. And they don't need to do LAN parties because they already have Fortnite and stuff. Life moves on. Your childhood was also markedly different from your parents'.

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.

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 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 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.

Anecdotally: a high school near us requires every student to have a computer. They do not hand out chromebooks and the requirement specs are a higher end Mac or PC laptop that the kids are required to bring to classes. These kids use blender, maya 3d, office suite, video and music editing software for example. They absolutely do not know any more about computers then chromebook kids (with a few exceptions). Having access to a computer doesnt magically make them know about how computers work.

Nah

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of big corporations, but Schools are gonna have to be using Device Management programs regardless of what OS they use (so that kids don't play video games, or use social media, or watch adult videos, in the classroom). Giving kids a Managed Windows Laptop with tons of restrictions does nothing to "improve tech literacy" either, so just as bad as a chrombook.

Also, wealth is also a factor. If you only have money for one device, and everyone has a smartphone, and you kids are gonna get socially ostricized in school for not having one, of course you're gonna prioritize giving them a smartphone first, which in turn, delays them learning how to use a computer, and I mean like a computer you actually own and can modify however you want, as opposed to the school-owned managed device. (Its harder to learn that when you're older)

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.

So the argument is that because Chromebooks just work and don't need troubleshooting unlike windows so this is Googles fault

OK

I use the old chrome book I have for writing. It was pretty easy to throw Linux on there. Was cheap when I bought it years ago, and still has like 10 hours of battery life. Just don't expect it to do much other than text processing and simple Web stuff.

If I remember correctly, they're all core-boot-able, which is neat. Can't do that with most other laptops.

Like, I see the problem, but my school actually gave out iPads, which I feel was worse. On the chrome book, you can at least access the file system and Linux.

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.

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.

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

chromebooks suck but this isn't really why

as a kid in middle school I had one, got annoyed enough with it to figure out how to sidload a Linux distro via the command line and just used that (just before Chromebooks had the line thing built in).

Probably what got me more into the more decentralized focused part of the internet

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.

Like this wasn't Apple's fault. Remember that ad where the kid doesn't know what a "computer" was?

Back in my day we brought our own MS-DOS boot disks to school to circumvent all the limitations.

No, really, it was corporate social media, and also the smartphone (iphone particularly). They don't need to know anything anymore thanks to those two. I mean even MySpace had kids learning CSS at least.

"We used to make our own webpages...!"

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.

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.

I am pretty confident it's the smartphone OSs (Android and iOS) that are more at fault. I remember having to install a file browser on my smartphone. Kids grown up with smartphones may not even know there are files and folder structures.

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

This goes from all directions. Even with Windows now Windows 11 comes with DRM.

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.

My son currently has a Chromebook with Linux, wine, steam. Not sure if your argument checks out.

I feel like this has way more to do with smartphones and apple than chromebooks but sure.

The laptops in 2026 will all have AI integrated into the hardware. It will be dependent on the AI in the cloud servers.

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