Google fucked a whole generation with Chromebooks, and now they're fucking the next generation with AI
Google fucked a whole generation with Chromebooks, and now they're fucking the next generation with AI
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.
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.
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.
They're all to blame
At my school the windows PC's were just as locked down as the Chromebooks. In either case, you clicked the chrome icon and went. I don't agree with this take
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
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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.
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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.
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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.
Where I live, Chromebooks never really took off. I had access to computers since kindergarten, but in my home I only had phones, so I mostly learned tinkering with them (installing custom ROMs, cracking, etc.) until I got an old Intel Atom with 2GB of RAM lol (I tried **anything **to get pirated games running). My younger sibling and cousins never really learned much about computers because they were introduced directly to smartphones, and since they weren't taught very much (other than basic Office tasks), they were never interested on computers nor my family was buying something kids didn't ask for. So in my case, Chromebooks didn't have anything to do, it was mostly bad parenting and the boom of smartphones :P
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.
Now do cars.
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.
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.
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.”
Not with chrimebooks, with android
This is LITERALLY the most regarded take one could have about Chromebooks
What's next, you want to gatekeep education as well?
Voting?
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.
At the school I was at, it wasn't just that it's a Chromebook, but they also lock the Chromebooks down. You can't use the Linux sandbox feature or the android features, and a proxy is enforced preventing you from going to any websites they deem distracting.
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.
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'.
Chromebooks didn't do shit.
It was tablets and phones replacing the home computer. Apple are equally complicit in this.
This is kind of like blaming car manufacturers for people not knowing how to drive manual and how cars work under the hood, because they made cars reliable and simple to use.
There's always an incentive to make things more accessible. Skills always become outdated because of that. How many of us know how to skin game and cook it on naked fire? Not many, I presume.
Chromebook for all its flaws and limitations still let children, who would not have otherwise used any computing device, at least use one.
Boomers and Gen X often handed tech problems to their kids, assuming young people just get it. That mindset stuck—tech as an innate skill, not something learned.
Millennials did learn, but by messing around—customizing MySpace, bypassing school filters, using forums. We had to figure it out. Now, everything's simplified and locked down. Because we're the ones making a lot of the tech and we've figured it out for them. You don’t need to understand the tech we make to use it.
The problem? Older generations think kids will “just get it,” like we did. But no one’s teaching them. We’re giving them phones and tablets, not skills or understanding. We assume either they just get it, or that they're tinkering around like "we" did.
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 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 has very little to do with Chromebooks. It's happening in countries where they are rare as well. The main cause is the fact that things for the most part just... work now. The experience on PCs and especially smartphones has become so streamlined that it doesn't require that much knowledge to be able to use them at a sufficient level. Plus smartphones have become the default device for most people so they almost never have to interact with stuff like the file system or anything complex. Most people don't care about understanding how computers work more than what they need them for, and that's fine.
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
Steve jobs is mot blameless here.
But yes.
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.
Are you suggesting to go back to days when every single little thing required a driver on a floppy disk? You buy a Chromebook, you install Denian on it with a few keypresses, your videocard magically works, your soundcard works, your WiFi just connects with no issues whatsoever, you ignore the fingerprint scanner hardware as usual because who even needs that shit when your password is 14 symbols long, and done, you are ready to install a gigabyte of NPM packages to create your single-page web app. Don't tell me Windows 95 was somehow better, it only made your life slower and miserable, just like your Intel i486SX which could not run Quake because it lacked FPU.
Monied interests have been destroying education for 4 decades. Google joined the party late, but they’ve certainly done their damage.
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.
Bruh even before Chromebooks it was only a select few geeks that pursued anything more than word processing.
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.
Seeing kids nowadays fail at basic computer stuff is so disheartening.
The laptops in 2026 will all have AI integrated into the hardware. It will be dependent on the AI in the cloud servers.
This goes from all directions. Even with Windows now Windows 11 comes with DRM.
Who cares about any of that? I didn’t see a single problem.
Most people suck with computers, no matter their age. There may or may not have been a time frame which resulted in a higher percentage of people knowing more basic computer stuff. Kids on computers tended to pick up more basic computer knowledge than kids only interacting with gaming consoles for the past 40 years. If you want to blame one thing for decreasing basic computer knowledge, kids being glued to their smartphones and not touching computers (laptops/towers) at all is the much more obvious candidate. Like kids playing on their N64 (insert arbitrary gaming console here) and not touching computers before. I think, OP, you're falling into a trap of over-projection, where you project yourself and your peers as a standard onto a generation/age-group, when most of us here on lemmy have always been the outliers. People are not "tech savvy"; never have been. Trying to put the blame on one company and product (no matter how evil and bad both are) for select age groups is ridiculous.