These poor things. I’ve seen kids break them, then proceed to think “can’t get any worse,” and stomp on them.
It’s amazing how people deal with equipment when it’s not theirs.
Kids just aren’t made to take care of things like responsible humans because they basically have no skin in the game. If they don’t take care of it, very little negative occurs.
My adult users take excellent care of their devices because they know if it’s broken, that affects their team budget, and ultimately their ability to get raises.
All that aside, ChromeOS is actually an excellent operating system - for people with lower technical skills, and/or need an OS with training wheels and safety rails. It updates seamlessly, operates with minimal jank, is better protected against malware, and can be wiped/recovered as a native feature, all generally without losing critical files.
Is it appropriate for a person doing IT work? Probably not, but that’s not really who it’s for. Aside from the highly technical or creative, it’s the perfect OS for many many roles, and the devs deserve more respect from the community for continuously iterating and improving on a great concept.
I know chromebooks are shit but the way kids treat technology these days is attrocious.
When i was a kid i got an iPad 2 when they first came out, i took such good care of it, especially since i’d previously cracked an iPod touch, i even stopped using it for a while because i saw the gap between the digitizer and LCD and i thought i broke it.
Still have it somewhere, last time i used it a few years ago it still worked.
They persevere despite being both school computers and chromebooks. There’s something to admire in their sadness.
I worked in a school district’s IT department right before Covid shut everything down. We were constantly salvaging parts from dead chromebooks to keep other ones running.
I wasn’t there long, but I learned a lot there. I’m pretty much the only person where I work that can actually open up a laptop and make repairs, like replacing a screen.
For elementary and middle school students, a Chromebook is a good choice for schools. Highly manageable, cheap, easy to repair. For what the students do, they are fine.
They fill a void between a tablet and a full-fledged laptop.
Speaking as an solo IT person for a small k12 district, they are wonderful and much easier to manage than anything else out there.
Dont change a running system
Yeah, that’s not the worst I’ve seen. I came in to work one morning and found a pile of parts on my desk that contained about 70% of two Chromebooks someone sawed or broke in half. Two of my coworkers who left after me that parked in a different lot found the pieces scattered in the lot before collecting them and dumping the pile on my desk.
I’m one of the technicians that fixes these things… you would not believe the kinds of things we see. Some of them are just flat out missing the entire top half of the computer. Others, touchpad is ripped out. Screens ripped into multiple layers. Keyboards arranged in alphabetical order… etc. Then there’s the kid who took off the bottom cover, put a peanut butter jelly sandwich in it, and screwed it back on with the sandwich still inside…
It’s just chaos.
I thought that was a rugged case at first. Yikes!
Not surprised, they have Windows XP-tier hardware and are slower than an Xbox One
I’m banging my head against the wall of the local senior center trying to convince them to replace their public-use Windows PCs with Chromebooks. They’re having to install various third party software packages to do things like clear browser data and block people from saving personal data on shared storage—all the things that Chromebooks do by default!
There is a simple solution to this problem. Make them pay if it gets damaged
As an IT person…
All that aside, ChromeOS is actually an excellent operating system - for people with lower technical skills, and/or need an OS with training wheels and safety rails. It updates seamlessly, operates with minimal jank, is better protected against malware, and can be wiped/recovered as a native feature, all generally without losing critical files.
Fuck everything about this. This right here is the reason nobody knows how to fix ANYTHING on their computer these days. We need to stop babying the entire fucking world with “low technical skills” and help them develop those skills through actual education. It’s not enough to rely on the user to Figure It Out, we need to be actively teaching people “Here’s how files work, here’s how to use applications, here’s how to be an admin and install things for yourself on your own machine, here’s basic stuff to know how to do like resetting a fucking password or refresh a page, here’s how to SEARCH for something”
The number of young people I work with today who either cannot or will not do so much as click on their wi-fi settings to see what network they’re on has been INCREASING as time passes, younger people are WORSE with tech than boomers now. They’re much more tech FRIENDLY in that they are willing to use a computer to do stuff at all, but they don’t know fucking anything about how to use it
i agree, but it does come with a couple downsides. firsthand experience with Sister’s chromebook:
Wifi is terrible, and disconnects every 2 seconds,
you cannot install Linux relatively easily, and it’s terrible for those of us that want to be able to run programs,
and the build quality is terrible. i know that’s no the Dev’s fault, but it’s still terrible. i wouuld much rather a thinkPad.
That’s a great use case! If suggest showing them the overall cost and time savings, and it’s worth checking if their current devices can be converted to ChromeOS Flex
Please stop pretending that every person in the workforce is capable of troubleshooting Windows drivers, or determining why a VPN isn’t working properly. For the entirety of modern computing, skilled technicians have been needed to support end users. That’s how the world works. No amount of smug elitism is going to solve that.
As a fellow IT person, shitty entitled attitudes are why IT tends to have a PR problem. Our job, no matter what specialty you’re in, is to make sure that the tools the end-users need to get their job done actually work - and it’s even better if the end-users know they can count on us. You want compounding issues over time? Make an end-user feel like they can’t talk to you. the Best IT teams are the ones that can remember their fucking job is fixing the tools treating people like the valuable fucking customers they are.
Sure, I’ll grant that folks are less knowledgeable, and that most of us had to learn the hard way through experience and experiment. That doesn’t give us the right to be assholes.
ChrOS solves a solveable problem efficiently. Saves time and money per-user. And makes us look like rock stars because things just work - and when they don’t, we can fix it and NOTHING changes for them.
A thinkPad and a Chromebook are completely different things. Don’t let the keyboard fool you—Chromebooks are trying to be tablets you can use for more than entertainment, not notebooks.
The problems you’re having is basically due to the. fact that a Chromebook is a device to fill the gap between a tablet and a full-fledged laptop.
While a tablet should be considered a ‘content consumption’ device, and an actual Windows laptop a ‘content creation’ device, a Chromebook is a ‘content consumption device that has limited creation abilities’.
ChromeOS was designed specifically to work within the Google framework. And the hardware was designed around that.
Why you’d want to install Linux on a device with a minimum of RAM and little to no onboard storage is beyond me. (most Chromebooks schools use have 4gb RAM and 32gb storage). And even if you get Linux installed, the machine specs will not allow for much more that creating documents and surfing the internet. Hardware specs are not impressive at all.
As for dropping wifi, I currently have 260 Chromebooks in my fleet and have zero wifi issues. You might have had a bad chipset in your sisters.