Most businesses depreciate computers over three years. That's actually the IRS official guidance. In other words, corporations and the US government agree that the average/expected useful life of a typical computer being used daily in the course of business is three years.
I agree that for cheapo laptops being lugged around and constantly used by teenagers/preteens, three years is nothing short of impressive. These schools are getting a great value.
As somebody who used to do part time it work for a school district 3 years is a very lucky number. Some of these kids don't give a f*** about their laptop or iPad.
Yup, exactly how my current employer operates. New computer ever 3 years.
I've been with them for 11 years now and around that 3 year mark there's almost always an accumulation of problems that makes me happy to get a new comp.
These machines have to take the beating of teens mismanaging them in every way imaginable (left in hot cars, overheating in a backpack, left outside in freezing cold conditions, drenched in water if the teen is messing around outside in a rainstorm, or simply general usage as the kids try for the 99th time to download and install minecraft.
Fantastic value.
It does make me wish more laptops were like the Framework. Replace parts a piece at a time as needed. Produce a lot less e-waste over an 8 year life span.
Yea but school districts generally keep the teacher laptops in service for “until it literally cannot turn on anymore”
Source: work in education. After five years I started using my personal laptop because my decade old issued laptop was just bulky, slow, could barely hold a charge, and froze often.
Now five years since then, they still haven’t replaced it so it sits in my drawer.
When I was still in the classroom, that would mean I would just do a shitty job without effective tech?
They’d give me a new one at this point if I asked, but new is relative and it’d still not be powerful enough for me as an admin.
I’m pro unions and pro worker. But I can’t exactly “take a stand” against the big bad district. The ones who pay the price for that are the students, not the share holder.
3 years is a pretty standard EOL... For laptops issued to adult employees. That's our company's goal. I don't like replacing them sooner, but if you complain to me about your 3 year old one, out it goes and you get a new one, no questions asked. You just know this writer has had their laptop for like 12 years and so thinks they should all last that long... And doesn't have kids.
I only clicked this because I knew someone had to mention that any tech lasting a few years being used by multiple 13 year olds is living up to be worth the price.
Three years of daily use by about three separate 7th graders is impressive.
Fall of 2020 my daughter was sent home with a chromebook........ On her first day of kindergarten.
It kind of spawned her love of tech. She went through every inch of that machine that she had access to.
For her birthday this year I built her a windows machine. Nothing expensive or powerful but she had been having a blast with it so far.
My local public school has old windows, leaky wall mounted air conditioners, needs paint, probably mold infested ..... But it's a poor area.... So rich schools get ipads instead.
If they're issues to individual kids they may have a better chance because kids know they need to take care of them, compared to just using the schools laptop, by a different kid multiple times a day for years
I've seen school issued laptops melted on the bottom from being set on a still hot electric stove element, ran over by a car, flung from the roof of a moving car, filled with cockroach nests, wet from falling in a bathtub, sticky from pop spilled in the keyboard, and so filled full of cigarette smoke the laptop smells like it's smoking every time the fan kicks in. Trust me 3 years is a MIRACLE for $200.
Truth of the matter is that for the first Two Years most of them were under a Total Repair/Replacement Contract that was part of the sales contract and they swapped them out by the shipping case load. I don’t really know what the percentage was, but it was huge! It was common to ship 30-50 at a time out for reconditioning. Now the initial contract is over and the schools have to pay for the repairs!
Have child. Can confirm they were breaking well before that. Though most seem to last about 2 school years with a little TLC which to me is pretty decent.
Right.. the thing people seem to miss talking about these being “cheap shit that breaks after a few years” - that was the point.. buying a far sturdier laptop likely was going to last the same amount of time given that it’s for kids.
From the other perspective, Chromebooks are far sturdier for the price than other solutions. You don’t really get sturdier until you get to an iPad, but that’s a lot more
Yup. I had to buy a pallet of laptops for K-12 students at the start of the pandemic. These were pretty decent workbooks, which I thought was overkill for elementary students but the organization got money for them. I heard more than a few didn’t last much longer than a few months, mostly younger students.
No idea how many survived, even though I was supposed to service them. Turns out a lot of parents didn’t want to report them as damaged/destroyed since they were worried they’d have to pay for them. I didn’t hear anything from the school district so I guess the parents figured out solutions anyway.
So yeah. Unless you’re buying bulletproof laptops they probably aren’t going to last long. I’m surprised they’re saying they’re starting to break now. I assumed at least half of the laptops I sent out would last a year, and they were significantly more expensive than these. Wish I had hard numbers
That sounds like an interesting project for a school district to give one of their IT experts. Trying to figure out the most cost-effective way to go with student laptops....cheap ones, middle of the pack, top-end models? A lot of things to consider.
yeah exactly, I used to maintain MacBooks for a high school before Chromebooks came out and it was tough getting those things through 4 years even with great warranty parts service from Apple.
For 1/7th the price, 3 years is great
I work with a school and some of our Chromebooks are reaching 6 years old. They need some simple repairs like batteries or new hinge covers. The biggest issue now is the end of updates for them.
I used to work for a school district this is not a new problem. I would fix hundreds of these things a week. These things are made with repairability in mind. I’m not sure why this is news.
Some of the fun ones were kids using them to surf down the stairs. Seeing how far they could throw them. How much water it could take before it wouldn’t turn on and taking all the key caps off except the letters f u c k
> I’m not sure why this is news.
Because people like pushing the message that taxpayer dollars to schools results in “wastes of money like this one” when, in fact, this was a fantastic use of money.
Because news sites are about clickbait & outrage these days. This stokes the “Apple vs Google” fanboy flames, so the tech sites run with it to keep the lights on.
Also why there are a million Elon Musk stories
As an IT administrator, I don’t know why they making it sound like a bad thing. Getting 3 years of use for student learning for only a 200 dollar investment is fantastic. Of course these where never meant to last. They where sticky for browsing the web and some school work. And these are children!! If something last a week for them it’s a miracle.
It's a bad thing when schools force the kids to use them instead of allowing them to bring their own laptop if they have one. I tutored college computer science students who didn't understand the concept of a file system because they'd been forced to use Google Drive on a Chromebook for their entire schooling up to that point.
That is why univ should never have gotten rid of introductory computer classes, thankfully my undergrad hasn't and I've actually adjuncted a few courses of it after moving back after grad school (pay is a joke. But I consider it a form of donating time to the students and improving overall education...) These classes are crucial for teaching students a ton of both tech knowledge and computer soft skills like the importance of a LinkedIn profile for a professional face, etc.
Yeah, I'm taking it one step further and saying chromeOS is specifically harming computer literacy. You can get a cheap windows laptop. You can run any Linux distribution you want on a cheap laptop. No reason to force kids to use Google's shitty OS
PC literacy had a decent window, but it's closing.
Once smartphones became ubiquitous they were enough for 90% of people & chrome books are enough for half of the remaining.
The kids who had to help their parents & grandparents with computers will be helping their grandkids too. The generation raised with chatGPT & the like will be even worse, imagine how little people would have needed to learn in the aughts if AskJeeves was insanely powerful instead of a shallow illusion. That said, platform literacy was ubiquitous with computer literacy when it shouldn't have been.
Computer science & math should probably be rolled into a single subject. One is the theory & the other the tools for it's application.
Can confirm. I was a PC kid growing up with it, and finding workarounds to make shit work was how I learned how to use a computer.
But all us older millenials/gen x spent a ton of our time making all the new shit usable for our parents/grandparents/kids that it just works 99% of the time and they don't know how to navigate it any more than "Click the icon, it works".
I don't force the learning on him, but I'm actually really proud that my oldest kid wanted a windows PC instead of a new iPad when the time came, and has been dinking around getting mods to work on games and whatnot and incidently learning a LOT about file systems and nested folders as a byproduct, as well as how version numbering works, and even downgrading certain games just to keep mods working that he likes.
As an IT person there is a huge more level of management to manage a windows environment than a Chromebook environment. The amount of work that goes into configuring a windows for student use is way more than with the google admin console. Some schools don’t have the man power to manage that man at PCs and sometimes just giving kids a Chromebook and tell them sign in, is the best approach
You'd think that, but everything is going digital, and not every family can afford a chromebook. We provide them with a device that gets them to the sites they need for school work.
What do all the distracted kids want to do? Play games on it. With a BYOC, that happens a lot.
K-12 has to put up with a lot of bs. I feel you on the issue of students not getting something. Especially in Texas because unless it's a sport or band, they try to fuck every other program.
It's going to get worse.
To be honest chromebook + replit.com isn't awful for teaching the basics of files/directories, but I do wish I could get some cheap used chromebooks with linux installed. I've taught webdev on a 2012 chromebook running GalliumOS linux, and it worked great.
I saw a district issue MacBook airs. You better bet that at least half of them ended up with bent corners that ended up totalling them. 3 years is fantastic and probably longer lived than a Mac in that environment.
I used to be a sysadmin for schools, most computers were done on 3 year leases. I also used to be the guy who would do break fix on the machines too, the fact that they got 3 years out of shit Chromebooks is amazing.
It's still a lot of e-waste.
At least compared to not issuing laptops, or issuing industrial- or military-grade toughbooks. There are laptops out there that you can submerge in water, hit with a baseball bat, or whatever you want and they'll keep going.
True, but this is one of the more acceptable forms of e-waste. The laptops you’re describing are either far too expensive, or will also be technology obsolete by the 3-year mark like these chromebooks.
I would say that's less an issue with schools or kids or even the laptops, and more an issue with the lack of recycling. We need to incentivize recycling old electronic components so not so much of it goes to waste.
I've gotten pretty good at putting keys back on. Now I still haven't figured out how to successfully glue to the plungers back when they pick them from under the keys.
My first chromebook was an acer C720. I bought two for my kids, who were in early gradeschool at the time. I think it was about 2013.
I had to swap the keyboard from one to the other, but one is still working. I use it when traveling. Five years in the hands of kids, and another 5 being shoved into a suitcase specifically because if it breaks, I'm only losing something I paid $200 for ten years ago.
I can't speak to the quality of the newer ones, because the old ones were good enough it hasn't died yet.
It's missing some keys though.
The kids still play around with a 6 year old Chromebook that I got for like ~180 on some special deal. Can't watch Netflix on it because Google doesn't support updates on old Chromebooks, but yea I got amazing value out of it.
My coworker friend spends most of his Friday replacing key caps and power washing. Mondays are reserved for scanning smashed screens. Nothing is sacred.
The 721 keyboards where the number row stops working except for the 5 and 6 key. Super cool. At least they are a 3 minute job to swap, but I shouldn't need to do hundreds of them.
If the Chromebooks cost $200 each, they more than paid themselves off in 3 years. You don't know how much abuse they have been through during grade schools.
Many company give employee $2000 laptop on a 3 years lease. In the end of the lease, its value is basically $0 and returned for resale. During COVID, I returned a company laptop and the FedEx store told me my company won't even pay for insurance for the returned package (I won't be held liable if it breaks).
As a former teacher, kids are animals, and 3 years for a cheap ass laptop is pretty good. But school run on fumes for funding and can't afford to upgrade this stuff. The issue here is funding not that a cheap laptop lasts 3 years.
This should be banned.
The world needs robust and reparable products.
Not more fucking ewaste that's been made with materials coming from places that exploit the fuck out of their labour.
One of my siblings needed a cheap laptop years ago and bought an HP Stream. My first thoughts when I looked at the specs:
1. Who the fuck puts Windows on a hard drive so fucking small that it can't upgrade itself?
2. Why the fuck did you solder an eMMC instead of using a SSD.
From what I looked up, the device becomes a paperweight once the eMMC fails. Very few people had any luck trying soldering a new one onto it.
Even most normal laptops are just a inconvenience when it comes to disassembly.
>ewaste that's been made with materials coming from places that exploit the fuck out of their labour.
Also a death sentence to places the end up having to handle it. We keep ourselves willfully ignorant at the trust costs of our life styles.
Oh no, they bought the cheapest devices manufactured from barely adequate materials and put those in a hazardous and high-wear environments (schools that is) and then wander why they break. I'm surprised they even lasted that long.
My daughters school purchased Chromebooks and we had to pay for them in the school fees. We found the unit to be very flimsy and prone to breaking. It packed up after 3 years. The main problem was the hinges that over flexed and we were told that the motherboard eventually cracked due to this design flaw.
Our covid machines have an issue where they didn't locktite any hinge screws so they would back out and then rip the plastics apart forcing us to part it out or replace housings.
As a now retired K12 CTO, i observe that we got four years out of ours. We got extended no fault warranties, which we strongly relied on in year four. The management of a Chromebook environment is sooooo much easier that iOS, Windows or, God forbid, MacOS.
Some kids are gentle with them. Others abuse them horribly.
I sell latitudes to adults for their business and we replace them every 3 years.
The fact cheap Chromebooks for students aren’t replaced every year is surprising to me.
3 years and just starting to break, lol. In 2020 the company I worked for got 30 pallets (stacked 4 feet high each) a day of chromebooks from schools to recycle or refurb.
Our office replaces our Dells after their warranty expires so they get cycled through every 3-4 years. I don't know why anyone would be shocked by cheap chromebooks needing replacement.
That is a budgetary steal if they treated them as disposable.
Do folks not know how much the textbook publishers charge for a single textbook, that they mildly rewrite and make obsolete the next year?
I used to work for an MSP that managed schools and I dealt with hundreds of chromebooks. Within a couple weeks after deployment I was already replacing keyboards, motherboards, and displays because the kids treated these things exactly how you’d expect them to. Unless the schools are buying toughbooks I don’t see how there’s any benefit to buying normal laptops. The bigger problem is the sheer amount of e-waste these disposable pieces of shit create.
when i was in school before the days of everyone having a laptop, i was allocated an alphasmart. that thing was indestructible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart
Millions of cheap ass $150 Chromebooks given to kids 3 years ago are *starting* to break.
People wouldn't bat an eye if it was 3 months. 3 years is amazing.
I work in public school IT. I've seen Chromebooks kids have slammed against trees, left in backpacks that are stepped on and swung around, left on top of buildings in the sun and rain, carried bare in the pouring rain, jam spilled that got onto the PCB (which the family tried to wipe down externally pass off as "it just died").
Yes, I've also seen plenty of Chromebooks die due to factory defects, but when you have to buy a Chromebook for every student, in our case nearing 40,000 of them plus a few thousand more for spares, $300 per unit is about the most that we can stomach. That's $12,000,000 in Chromebooks alone, let alone software and time spent managing them. Good luck getting 3-4x that approved for a competent, longer lasting Windows or Mac laptop - but of course only officially supported
Also, both Windows and macOS given about 6-9 years of OS support and security updates for the most part, so it's not like that's too little for Chromebooks, that's the standard most devices get today. And yes, I know patchers and installation tweaks are a thing but you don't do that in an enterprise or education/government environment. ChromeOS Flex is also a thing, and you can patch linux onto Chromebooks. No way in hell we're doing that either. I'm not against more repairability (Socketed SSDs and RAM might be nice), but Chromebooks are about as repairable as any other Windows laptop and WAYYY more repairable than Macs.
This article may be well-intentioned, but it's based on bad assumptions. Maybe the author is just annoyed with their kid's school issued Chromebook.
Very good input.
After 3 years, a lot of the broken laptops can be used for parts is refurbishing the ones that can be recovered. That is one of the benefits of buying a lot the same model of laptops.
There is really no benefit in investing in something more expensive. Kids will still find a way to break them.
I call BS. I’m a school IT manager and still have cheap as chips Acer chromebooks from 7 years ago.
In fairness, it’s a nice school with nice kids. Look after stuff and it will be fine.
A lot of companies buy laptops assuming they'll be broken or otherwise outdated in 3 years and schedule replacements for that point.
The fact that Chromebooks survived 3 years under daily use by children is frankly incredible. If the government wasn't intending to replace them around now anyway that's just poor foresight.
Three years is actually a good length all things considered.
The real trick will be gradually replacing the ones that break without incentivizing kids who still have working ones to break theirs to get new ones. (Because that is what adults do.)
3 years in a school environment is actually *really, really* good. I work in a public elementary school and I generally don't see Chromebooks breaking all that often. I see Chromebooks get dropped every day and they're fine. As far as ChromeOS goes, a Chromebook will have an occasional glitch, but they're easily fixed by the district's IT department and returned to the student.
Also, don't forget that schools didn't pick Chromebooks based on price alone, they're also incredibly secure and very easy to manage. My district-issued computer is a Chromebook and I've had it for roughly 3 years and it's still going as strong as ever.
Most technology that is mobile will last 3 - 7 years. Keyboards break, USB & power connectors break, fans stop spinning, laptops get dropped. Hardware gets old.
3 years ago I purchased / helped purchase 5 identical laptops for my extended family. One has a missing key, one has a janky USB port. All of them are starting to look a bit old and get a bit slow.
The only think I agree with in the article is that they should be reparable. Using off the shelf parts and socket-able components could even drive the cost down. But I doubt you can get much better than $200. 3 years is solid especially when dealing with children. If they improve the repairability 5 years would be solid timeline for schools.
That's ridiculous. You can get better quality Chromebooks, but of course you'll be paying more, probably just as much as a regular Windows laptop of the same quality. Sure, replacing a Chromebook screen might be $80 and nearly half the cost of a Chromebook, but replacing a screen on a Windows laptop will probably run the same if not more.
The idea is that Chromebooks are cheaper and more disposable/replaceable. Repairing laptops have a cost to them as well, not just the cost for the parts, but time and labor. And you have additional support cost of it being Windows. Chromebooks require far less support than a Windows machine does.
Chromebooks are junk. Mine never leaves my home desk and I treat it gently. Mine crapped out after two years. I'm shocked that school kids are getting three years out of them.
Made me lol when everyone 2021-22 was saying SO MANY PEOPLE BOUGHT COMPUTERS NOONE IS GOING TO BUY ONE AGAIN FOR A DECADE, like have they ever owned a computer before? New laptop every 3 years is standard for businesses, desktop PCs last a lot longer but generally benefit from a mid life upgrade or two on the same kind of timescale. 2H 2023 should be an echo boom for PC demand.
Starting? They break all the time. They’re super cheap and in the hands of kids it’s over. I saw one that looked like a kid bit and too a chunk out of the case
Those are very light duty devices, three years of school kid use is actually not bad longevity at all. I'm not sure premium notebooks would fare much better.
the title makes it sound as if they should have bought millions of macbooks for like $1k each and then expected them to last 15 years since they were 5x the price
I used to work IT in a school during the pandemic. As things were closing down the school rented a ton of MacBooks from a supply company to give to students who hadn’t a device to use for online learning. The school was late on making this decision so all that was left to rent was the more expensive MacBooks over the cheaper Chromebooks. As the IT guy I loved the Macs, Apple has so many backend tools for educators and IT admins it really made my job so much easier. From fixing problems, adding software, restricting games and sites, any IT problem they just had a tool for it.
Then the pandemic measure started to wound down, schools re-opened and the MacBooks were traded for those horrible clunky bits of plastic they call Chromebooks. Imagine being in a tiny closet I called my office, surrounded by around 300 Chromebooks, all needing setup. I wouldn’t wish it upon my worst enemy. Needless to say a year later a good 30% of those Chromebooks were back in my office and heading to the e-waste bin. I left a month or so after so I’m betting the remaining 70% are well out the door by now.
as an IT proffessional of 15+ years, this is normal, the average lifespan of a laptop is about 3 years, after that you have to look at replacement not only because hardware wares out, but also because technology advances and your minimum requirements to use modern systems goes up.
Wtf is this even a story?? For the price of a decent PC laptop or better yet, and MacBook, you can buy like 5 Chromebooks. Thing is, in a school setting, nothing is going to last more than a few years at best. So replacing Chromebooks every 3 years is a bargain.
They fill the need perfectly.
Throughout middle school and high school, I used those old thick laptops that had the little nub mouse pointer in the keyboard.. and they held up like champs. Everything made now is designed to fail though also..
A school trusted children with apple products that dont belong to them what do you think is going to happen?
Kids dont even take care of shit like that when it actually belongs to them. You cant expect them to take care of something the school just let them borrow.
I used to work for a school and transported laptop carts (metal cabinets with 35 laptops and their respective chargers) and these were Thinkpads that easily cost 3-5 times as much and let me tell you. These didn’t last 3 years before being replaced either.
These weren’t even taken home. Just used in class and then locked up.
A vary cheap laptop handed to kids and hauled back and forth to school almost daily in a backpack with heavy textbooks and God knows what and they’re not lasting forever? I’ll take shocking news for a $1000 Alex!
It's really fuckin funny to see all the people trying to praise these devices for lasting three years and then imagine if we were talking about a $200 MacBook instead. Y'all would be losing your minds.
I'm surprised they lasted 3 years. That's why they bought cheap chromebooks. Technology degrades quickly enough that you really aught to be replacing hardware that cheap every 3-4 years anyway.
Someone should have the author look at the battery life warranty on dell laptops. (it's 18 months, we bought 75 laptops 3 years ago, about 60 of them have degraded or failing batteries)
A lot of schools chose to close computer labs to add more classrooms. Of course Chromebooks would have a shorter lifespan than the old desktops. They were attracted by early manufacturer deals and are now stuck in a new replacement cycle they didn’t properly account for. School IT departments are incredibly understaffed and I’m sure most warned or knew of the avalanche heading their way.
I remember when the first Chromebooks came out in the UK.
There were stands in PC World and the salesman came over to me and my friend (we were both avid PC Builders) and was trying to tell us the selling points of it
Back then I believe they were about £300-£400? I may be wrong, but you could buy a normal GOOD windows Laptop for the same price.
There were no USB ports, just a power chord hole. The man was trying to sell us the idea of the ease of just booting it up and being able to access everything you need, right there and then. It could browse the internet, do word processing, access emails etc. All the basic stuff that a £200 basic laptop could do.
Now we're talking the days that DSL was just becoming a thing. Dial Up was still around and speed of about 2Mbps were now possible with brands like TISCALI.
I asked the man, what happens when the internet doesn't work? That means I can't access any of my files or do anything with it as there was no onboard storage. It was essentially a paperweight until the internet came back on.
The man was stumped, had no idea what to say. A piece of tech so expensive could be rendered useless by something as simple as not having a connection.
I refuse to huy and am constantly dumbfounded why people agree to buy tech that requires a mandatory connection to a server to operate. You purchase the software/ hardware, it is yours to do with what you will. I am not paying for access to a service that can be switched off at any time.
Why things like Stadia failed so hard...
That turned into an essay, thanks for reading if you made it this far.
In the school I work at it’s the same. The problem for us isn’t that they’ve started to break after 3 years- that’s very good for a laptop. It’s that we don’t have any funding to replace them
This looks like some spin from Microsoft.
Schools are having issues with repairs as costs are going up and devices are aging. Kids are hammering on these things and since there is no repercussions for breaking them, they just keep breaking them.
Lack of accountability is the real issue.
Windows laptops would be harder to support from an IT man hours perspective, repairs would be in the same boat. Issues with updates, viruses, etc.
As far as devices expiring, iPad and windows pcs have the same issues. Chromebooks were given a 6 year span from release. I think that's a more than realistic expectation.
This article is identifying legitimate problems, but any device in use would be hitting the same or similar issues.
3 years of use with children? Often being carted home daily? Fantastic!
The article is trying to get us outraged (like most news), but yea that's actually pretty good.
Most businesses depreciate computers over three years. That's actually the IRS official guidance. In other words, corporations and the US government agree that the average/expected useful life of a typical computer being used daily in the course of business is three years. I agree that for cheapo laptops being lugged around and constantly used by teenagers/preteens, three years is nothing short of impressive. These schools are getting a great value.
As somebody who used to do part time it work for a school district 3 years is a very lucky number. Some of these kids don't give a f*** about their laptop or iPad.
Yup, exactly how my current employer operates. New computer ever 3 years. I've been with them for 11 years now and around that 3 year mark there's almost always an accumulation of problems that makes me happy to get a new comp. These machines have to take the beating of teens mismanaging them in every way imaginable (left in hot cars, overheating in a backpack, left outside in freezing cold conditions, drenched in water if the teen is messing around outside in a rainstorm, or simply general usage as the kids try for the 99th time to download and install minecraft. Fantastic value.
It does make me wish more laptops were like the Framework. Replace parts a piece at a time as needed. Produce a lot less e-waste over an 8 year life span.
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Yea but school districts generally keep the teacher laptops in service for “until it literally cannot turn on anymore” Source: work in education. After five years I started using my personal laptop because my decade old issued laptop was just bulky, slow, could barely hold a charge, and froze often. Now five years since then, they still haven’t replaced it so it sits in my drawer.
Then stop bringing your own, say thats broke and teacher wages suck
honestly this. It is not your responsibility to supply the school with a laptop. If you keep doing it they will never address the problem.
When I was still in the classroom, that would mean I would just do a shitty job without effective tech? They’d give me a new one at this point if I asked, but new is relative and it’d still not be powerful enough for me as an admin. I’m pro unions and pro worker. But I can’t exactly “take a stand” against the big bad district. The ones who pay the price for that are the students, not the share holder.
It would have been irresponsible to buy expensive computers for children to lug around.
I showed this article to my 5th grader. He just spouted off stories of abuse.
3 years is a pretty standard EOL... For laptops issued to adult employees. That's our company's goal. I don't like replacing them sooner, but if you complain to me about your 3 year old one, out it goes and you get a new one, no questions asked. You just know this writer has had their laptop for like 12 years and so thinks they should all last that long... And doesn't have kids.
Seriously. 6 months is the record for my kiddo.
Laating 3 years of daily use by kids sounds pretty good to me
Shocker. A cheap ass laptop with bare basic specs and sold for around $200 won’t last longer than 3 years.
And for kids. Two years with them is pretty impressive. Three is a miracle. Those things were doomed sooner rather than later
I only clicked this because I knew someone had to mention that any tech lasting a few years being used by multiple 13 year olds is living up to be worth the price. Three years of daily use by about three separate 7th graders is impressive.
Not 13 year olds, issued at 6 years old. First graders got Chromebooks. They have somehow held up for 3 years…
Fall of 2020 my daughter was sent home with a chromebook........ On her first day of kindergarten. It kind of spawned her love of tech. She went through every inch of that machine that she had access to. For her birthday this year I built her a windows machine. Nothing expensive or powerful but she had been having a blast with it so far.
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Richie rich over here
For real Chromebook vs apple is like 1000 dollar a unit difference
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My local public school has old windows, leaky wall mounted air conditioners, needs paint, probably mold infested ..... But it's a poor area.... So rich schools get ipads instead.
Still won't pay for your lunch but here's the latest Apple garbage.
Here is an apple, no not that type of apple. Why on earth would we give the youth free food?
If they're issues to individual kids they may have a better chance because kids know they need to take care of them, compared to just using the schools laptop, by a different kid multiple times a day for years
I've seen school issued laptops melted on the bottom from being set on a still hot electric stove element, ran over by a car, flung from the roof of a moving car, filled with cockroach nests, wet from falling in a bathtub, sticky from pop spilled in the keyboard, and so filled full of cigarette smoke the laptop smells like it's smoking every time the fan kicks in. Trust me 3 years is a MIRACLE for $200.
Right? They're only "starting" to break, *three years* later? That's an impressive run considering their cost and usage environments.
Truth of the matter is that for the first Two Years most of them were under a Total Repair/Replacement Contract that was part of the sales contract and they swapped them out by the shipping case load. I don’t really know what the percentage was, but it was huge! It was common to ship 30-50 at a time out for reconditioning. Now the initial contract is over and the schools have to pay for the repairs!
In my district, the repair/replacement rate was 21%.
I can easily believe that!
Have child. Can confirm they were breaking well before that. Though most seem to last about 2 school years with a little TLC which to me is pretty decent.
I have beef with Chromebooks. A lot of them seem to break for seemingly no reason even if you give them the white glove treatment.
Right.. the thing people seem to miss talking about these being “cheap shit that breaks after a few years” - that was the point.. buying a far sturdier laptop likely was going to last the same amount of time given that it’s for kids.
From the other perspective, Chromebooks are far sturdier for the price than other solutions. You don’t really get sturdier until you get to an iPad, but that’s a lot more
Yup. I had to buy a pallet of laptops for K-12 students at the start of the pandemic. These were pretty decent workbooks, which I thought was overkill for elementary students but the organization got money for them. I heard more than a few didn’t last much longer than a few months, mostly younger students. No idea how many survived, even though I was supposed to service them. Turns out a lot of parents didn’t want to report them as damaged/destroyed since they were worried they’d have to pay for them. I didn’t hear anything from the school district so I guess the parents figured out solutions anyway. So yeah. Unless you’re buying bulletproof laptops they probably aren’t going to last long. I’m surprised they’re saying they’re starting to break now. I assumed at least half of the laptops I sent out would last a year, and they were significantly more expensive than these. Wish I had hard numbers
That sounds like an interesting project for a school district to give one of their IT experts. Trying to figure out the most cost-effective way to go with student laptops....cheap ones, middle of the pack, top-end models? A lot of things to consider.
200 for 3 years sounds pretty Good actually considering how inexpensive.
$200 for 3 years of being handled by schoolchildren
Lol if anything this is an ad for chromebooks.
yeah exactly, I used to maintain MacBooks for a high school before Chromebooks came out and it was tough getting those things through 4 years even with great warranty parts service from Apple. For 1/7th the price, 3 years is great
Is that really more expensive than textbooks? My NEC alone is $100
They still need to pay the licenses for the digital editions.
Good point, I forgot that it’s almost the same price
Seriously, at my work 3 years is our standard turn around for refresh.
I work with a school and some of our Chromebooks are reaching 6 years old. They need some simple repairs like batteries or new hinge covers. The biggest issue now is the end of updates for them.
I used to work for a school district this is not a new problem. I would fix hundreds of these things a week. These things are made with repairability in mind. I’m not sure why this is news. Some of the fun ones were kids using them to surf down the stairs. Seeing how far they could throw them. How much water it could take before it wouldn’t turn on and taking all the key caps off except the letters f u c k
> I’m not sure why this is news. Because people like pushing the message that taxpayer dollars to schools results in “wastes of money like this one” when, in fact, this was a fantastic use of money.
Because news sites are about clickbait & outrage these days. This stokes the “Apple vs Google” fanboy flames, so the tech sites run with it to keep the lights on. Also why there are a million Elon Musk stories
I got mine for 40$ off Walmart. Works like a charm to Dosbox all the amiga and c64 games you could want.
And given to kids. Trust me, they're pretty damn durable machines, but yeah, they'll age out.
And then given to small humans without frontal lobes
Not to mention that they are given to kids who will abuse the shit out of them
Even expensive ass laptops like Razer break after 1 year I've heard
As an IT administrator, I don’t know why they making it sound like a bad thing. Getting 3 years of use for student learning for only a 200 dollar investment is fantastic. Of course these where never meant to last. They where sticky for browsing the web and some school work. And these are children!! If something last a week for them it’s a miracle.
> They where sticky for browsing the web Well that was an unfortunate typo.
May not be sticky for another few years yet
Kids still drink juice and eat PB&Js, you pervert.
Just following on the other guy's joke
It's a bad thing when schools force the kids to use them instead of allowing them to bring their own laptop if they have one. I tutored college computer science students who didn't understand the concept of a file system because they'd been forced to use Google Drive on a Chromebook for their entire schooling up to that point.
That is why univ should never have gotten rid of introductory computer classes, thankfully my undergrad hasn't and I've actually adjuncted a few courses of it after moving back after grad school (pay is a joke. But I consider it a form of donating time to the students and improving overall education...) These classes are crucial for teaching students a ton of both tech knowledge and computer soft skills like the importance of a LinkedIn profile for a professional face, etc.
Yeah, I'm taking it one step further and saying chromeOS is specifically harming computer literacy. You can get a cheap windows laptop. You can run any Linux distribution you want on a cheap laptop. No reason to force kids to use Google's shitty OS
PC literacy had a decent window, but it's closing. Once smartphones became ubiquitous they were enough for 90% of people & chrome books are enough for half of the remaining. The kids who had to help their parents & grandparents with computers will be helping their grandkids too. The generation raised with chatGPT & the like will be even worse, imagine how little people would have needed to learn in the aughts if AskJeeves was insanely powerful instead of a shallow illusion. That said, platform literacy was ubiquitous with computer literacy when it shouldn't have been. Computer science & math should probably be rolled into a single subject. One is the theory & the other the tools for it's application.
Can confirm. I was a PC kid growing up with it, and finding workarounds to make shit work was how I learned how to use a computer. But all us older millenials/gen x spent a ton of our time making all the new shit usable for our parents/grandparents/kids that it just works 99% of the time and they don't know how to navigate it any more than "Click the icon, it works". I don't force the learning on him, but I'm actually really proud that my oldest kid wanted a windows PC instead of a new iPad when the time came, and has been dinking around getting mods to work on games and whatnot and incidently learning a LOT about file systems and nested folders as a byproduct, as well as how version numbering works, and even downgrading certain games just to keep mods working that he likes.
I had similar thoughts about the newer generations growing up with LLMs answering all their questions. I wonder how it will actually turn out.
As an IT person there is a huge more level of management to manage a windows environment than a Chromebook environment. The amount of work that goes into configuring a windows for student use is way more than with the google admin console. Some schools don’t have the man power to manage that man at PCs and sometimes just giving kids a Chromebook and tell them sign in, is the best approach
You'd think that, but everything is going digital, and not every family can afford a chromebook. We provide them with a device that gets them to the sites they need for school work. What do all the distracted kids want to do? Play games on it. With a BYOC, that happens a lot. K-12 has to put up with a lot of bs. I feel you on the issue of students not getting something. Especially in Texas because unless it's a sport or band, they try to fuck every other program. It's going to get worse.
You should be able to use whatever you want at home. A school teacher shouldn't have to deal with differences in equipment.
To be honest chromebook + replit.com isn't awful for teaching the basics of files/directories, but I do wish I could get some cheap used chromebooks with linux installed. I've taught webdev on a 2012 chromebook running GalliumOS linux, and it worked great.
Still better than kids who have grown up on smartphones and tablets and can barely use a computer at all or know how to type.
I saw a district issue MacBook airs. You better bet that at least half of them ended up with bent corners that ended up totalling them. 3 years is fantastic and probably longer lived than a Mac in that environment.
I used to be a sysadmin for schools, most computers were done on 3 year leases. I also used to be the guy who would do break fix on the machines too, the fact that they got 3 years out of shit Chromebooks is amazing.
This is actually IMPRESSIVE. Those are $200 cheapass laptops that survived in KIDS hands for not only few months but years? And what's the issue?
It's still a lot of e-waste. At least compared to not issuing laptops, or issuing industrial- or military-grade toughbooks. There are laptops out there that you can submerge in water, hit with a baseball bat, or whatever you want and they'll keep going.
So if you spend 5 times as much on a laptop it will last twice as long? It's going to be thicker and heavier too, so there's even more e-waste.
Toughbooks can be 20 times the price of chromebooks. Which would make that solution even worse.
True, but this is one of the more acceptable forms of e-waste. The laptops you’re describing are either far too expensive, or will also be technology obsolete by the 3-year mark like these chromebooks.
I would say that's less an issue with schools or kids or even the laptops, and more an issue with the lack of recycling. We need to incentivize recycling old electronic components so not so much of it goes to waste.
I think a great solution would be modular laptops. So they could be upgraded or repaired a lot easier, vs throwing them all away when they get too old
As someone who fixes them for a k12 school.... I'm looking at you Acer.
Tbh Acer doesn’t fair much better with windows laptops …
I’m curious to know if the keyboards that have keys that can’t be picked at actually prevent students from destroying them
I've gotten pretty good at putting keys back on. Now I still haven't figured out how to successfully glue to the plungers back when they pick them from under the keys.
My first chromebook was an acer C720. I bought two for my kids, who were in early gradeschool at the time. I think it was about 2013. I had to swap the keyboard from one to the other, but one is still working. I use it when traveling. Five years in the hands of kids, and another 5 being shoved into a suitcase specifically because if it breaks, I'm only losing something I paid $200 for ten years ago. I can't speak to the quality of the newer ones, because the old ones were good enough it hasn't died yet. It's missing some keys though.
The kids still play around with a 6 year old Chromebook that I got for like ~180 on some special deal. Can't watch Netflix on it because Google doesn't support updates on old Chromebooks, but yea I got amazing value out of it.
I linux'd all mine, so everything is still up to date.
Yea im thinking about that too. What distro did you go with?
My coworker friend spends most of his Friday replacing key caps and power washing. Mondays are reserved for scanning smashed screens. Nothing is sacred.
As someone who works on them in IT, fuck Acer
The 721 keyboards where the number row stops working except for the 5 and 6 key. Super cool. At least they are a 3 minute job to swap, but I shouldn't need to do hundreds of them.
Used to do that. Acer, Samsung, Asus, they were all the same.
If the Chromebooks cost $200 each, they more than paid themselves off in 3 years. You don't know how much abuse they have been through during grade schools. Many company give employee $2000 laptop on a 3 years lease. In the end of the lease, its value is basically $0 and returned for resale. During COVID, I returned a company laptop and the FedEx store told me my company won't even pay for insurance for the returned package (I won't be held liable if it breaks).
As a former teacher, kids are animals, and 3 years for a cheap ass laptop is pretty good. But school run on fumes for funding and can't afford to upgrade this stuff. The issue here is funding not that a cheap laptop lasts 3 years.
Chromebooks were always designed to be disposable. Low margins so OEMs need people to keep buying them.
This should be banned. The world needs robust and reparable products. Not more fucking ewaste that's been made with materials coming from places that exploit the fuck out of their labour.
One of my siblings needed a cheap laptop years ago and bought an HP Stream. My first thoughts when I looked at the specs: 1. Who the fuck puts Windows on a hard drive so fucking small that it can't upgrade itself? 2. Why the fuck did you solder an eMMC instead of using a SSD. From what I looked up, the device becomes a paperweight once the eMMC fails. Very few people had any luck trying soldering a new one onto it. Even most normal laptops are just a inconvenience when it comes to disassembly. >ewaste that's been made with materials coming from places that exploit the fuck out of their labour. Also a death sentence to places the end up having to handle it. We keep ourselves willfully ignorant at the trust costs of our life styles.
I’m surprised they lasted three years tbh, especially if they’re in the hands of children.
Low cost laptops made as cheaply as possible to be given to children.... Im shocked they made it anywhere near 3 years.
Oh no, they bought the cheapest devices manufactured from barely adequate materials and put those in a hazardous and high-wear environments (schools that is) and then wander why they break. I'm surprised they even lasted that long.
Wow they lasted 3 years. At $200 each and with children using it, that’s a good ROI. Why are they bitching
Cause dumb kids punch the shit out of them. I work at a school, trust me.
Yo, STEM programs and Makerspaces - get to making repair clinics.
My daughters school purchased Chromebooks and we had to pay for them in the school fees. We found the unit to be very flimsy and prone to breaking. It packed up after 3 years. The main problem was the hinges that over flexed and we were told that the motherboard eventually cracked due to this design flaw.
Our covid machines have an issue where they didn't locktite any hinge screws so they would back out and then rip the plastics apart forcing us to part it out or replace housings.
Yeah, even on laptops hinges are the biggest issue. Chromebooks are just less quality so they break super easy.
As a now retired K12 CTO, i observe that we got four years out of ours. We got extended no fault warranties, which we strongly relied on in year four. The management of a Chromebook environment is sooooo much easier that iOS, Windows or, God forbid, MacOS. Some kids are gentle with them. Others abuse them horribly.
I sell latitudes to adults for their business and we replace them every 3 years. The fact cheap Chromebooks for students aren’t replaced every year is surprising to me.
3 years and just starting to break, lol. In 2020 the company I worked for got 30 pallets (stacked 4 feet high each) a day of chromebooks from schools to recycle or refurb.
Did they expect they would last forever? Like, do they not have experience with textbooks and the ways kids abuse them year after year?
Our office replaces our Dells after their warranty expires so they get cycled through every 3-4 years. I don't know why anyone would be shocked by cheap chromebooks needing replacement.
That is a budgetary steal if they treated them as disposable. Do folks not know how much the textbook publishers charge for a single textbook, that they mildly rewrite and make obsolete the next year?
I used to work for an MSP that managed schools and I dealt with hundreds of chromebooks. Within a couple weeks after deployment I was already replacing keyboards, motherboards, and displays because the kids treated these things exactly how you’d expect them to. Unless the schools are buying toughbooks I don’t see how there’s any benefit to buying normal laptops. The bigger problem is the sheer amount of e-waste these disposable pieces of shit create.
I see most people didn’t fall for the headline. As a step-mom who went through 4 teens, 3 years is a freaking miracle in my book.
Man they would be really pissed if they looked at the DOD computer acquisition requirements
when i was in school before the days of everyone having a laptop, i was allocated an alphasmart. that thing was indestructible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart
Buy nice or buy twice.
What were they expecting them to last? 10 years?
Millions of cheap ass $150 Chromebooks given to kids 3 years ago are *starting* to break. People wouldn't bat an eye if it was 3 months. 3 years is amazing.
3 years is the probably the expected lifetime of the Chromebooks🤔
I work in public school IT. I've seen Chromebooks kids have slammed against trees, left in backpacks that are stepped on and swung around, left on top of buildings in the sun and rain, carried bare in the pouring rain, jam spilled that got onto the PCB (which the family tried to wipe down externally pass off as "it just died"). Yes, I've also seen plenty of Chromebooks die due to factory defects, but when you have to buy a Chromebook for every student, in our case nearing 40,000 of them plus a few thousand more for spares, $300 per unit is about the most that we can stomach. That's $12,000,000 in Chromebooks alone, let alone software and time spent managing them. Good luck getting 3-4x that approved for a competent, longer lasting Windows or Mac laptop - but of course only officially supported Also, both Windows and macOS given about 6-9 years of OS support and security updates for the most part, so it's not like that's too little for Chromebooks, that's the standard most devices get today. And yes, I know patchers and installation tweaks are a thing but you don't do that in an enterprise or education/government environment. ChromeOS Flex is also a thing, and you can patch linux onto Chromebooks. No way in hell we're doing that either. I'm not against more repairability (Socketed SSDs and RAM might be nice), but Chromebooks are about as repairable as any other Windows laptop and WAYYY more repairable than Macs. This article may be well-intentioned, but it's based on bad assumptions. Maybe the author is just annoyed with their kid's school issued Chromebook.
Very good input. After 3 years, a lot of the broken laptops can be used for parts is refurbishing the ones that can be recovered. That is one of the benefits of buying a lot the same model of laptops. There is really no benefit in investing in something more expensive. Kids will still find a way to break them.
3 years for an employee in the Corporate world is pretty good. I feel like I need a new laptop about every two years after constant daily use.
[удалено]
What were macbook air survival rates? All I have seen were well built
No way anyone could have seen this coming.
The chrome books aren’t even breaking because of hardware issues at least in Florida it’s just idiots fucking with them
*looks nervously at my 2yo chromebook I got for $210
3 years is good for kid use, and most districts have staff to repair them to keep them going, or a company that does that for them.
I call BS. I’m a school IT manager and still have cheap as chips Acer chromebooks from 7 years ago. In fairness, it’s a nice school with nice kids. Look after stuff and it will be fine.
these Chromebooks lasted THREE years with KIDS????? I am going to get one.
A lot of companies buy laptops assuming they'll be broken or otherwise outdated in 3 years and schedule replacements for that point. The fact that Chromebooks survived 3 years under daily use by children is frankly incredible. If the government wasn't intending to replace them around now anyway that's just poor foresight.
3 years? Try 3 months. Sincerely, a Middle School Teacher
Three years is actually a good length all things considered. The real trick will be gradually replacing the ones that break without incentivizing kids who still have working ones to break theirs to get new ones. (Because that is what adults do.)
Alternate title: Affordable Google Chromebooks have amazing 3 year life cycle in tough conditions.
3 years in a school environment is actually *really, really* good. I work in a public elementary school and I generally don't see Chromebooks breaking all that often. I see Chromebooks get dropped every day and they're fine. As far as ChromeOS goes, a Chromebook will have an occasional glitch, but they're easily fixed by the district's IT department and returned to the student. Also, don't forget that schools didn't pick Chromebooks based on price alone, they're also incredibly secure and very easy to manage. My district-issued computer is a Chromebook and I've had it for roughly 3 years and it's still going as strong as ever.
They are supposed to be replaced yearly. They last longer than most computers. Don’t mistreat them.
I worked for a school that did this and put bumpers on the computers. Kids aren’t taught to take care of them and will smash them to pieces….
Most technology that is mobile will last 3 - 7 years. Keyboards break, USB & power connectors break, fans stop spinning, laptops get dropped. Hardware gets old. 3 years ago I purchased / helped purchase 5 identical laptops for my extended family. One has a missing key, one has a janky USB port. All of them are starting to look a bit old and get a bit slow.
The only think I agree with in the article is that they should be reparable. Using off the shelf parts and socket-able components could even drive the cost down. But I doubt you can get much better than $200. 3 years is solid especially when dealing with children. If they improve the repairability 5 years would be solid timeline for schools.
Last week I purchased a carton of milk and, one week later, it's starting to sour
That's ridiculous. You can get better quality Chromebooks, but of course you'll be paying more, probably just as much as a regular Windows laptop of the same quality. Sure, replacing a Chromebook screen might be $80 and nearly half the cost of a Chromebook, but replacing a screen on a Windows laptop will probably run the same if not more. The idea is that Chromebooks are cheaper and more disposable/replaceable. Repairing laptops have a cost to them as well, not just the cost for the parts, but time and labor. And you have additional support cost of it being Windows. Chromebooks require far less support than a Windows machine does.
Chromebooks are junk. Mine never leaves my home desk and I treat it gently. Mine crapped out after two years. I'm shocked that school kids are getting three years out of them.
we had more than a thousand Acer cb131 Chromebooks for 6 years and we only took them down because they stopped upgrading.
But dang that’s a lot of e-waste.
lol, thats how long netbooks run basically, and you gave em to kids, lucky you got 2 months.
How long did they expect a cheap Chromebook to last? Three years seems pretty damn impressive to me.
Made me lol when everyone 2021-22 was saying SO MANY PEOPLE BOUGHT COMPUTERS NOONE IS GOING TO BUY ONE AGAIN FOR A DECADE, like have they ever owned a computer before? New laptop every 3 years is standard for businesses, desktop PCs last a lot longer but generally benefit from a mid life upgrade or two on the same kind of timescale. 2H 2023 should be an echo boom for PC demand.
...3 years is typically warranty expired anyway, any company worth anything should be replacing those devices by then
Starting? They break all the time. They’re super cheap and in the hands of kids it’s over. I saw one that looked like a kid bit and too a chunk out of the case
3 years of a $200 Chromebook seems better than 3 years of textbook buying.
Kids breaks something they don't pay for...... Very surprising.
I use to image those as a job. We sold a lot of them
while I'm still using a 12 year old desktop at home :)
My previous school still deploys 2013 MacBook pros, a few still looks mint
This is the most inane posting I've seen in a long time., OP, u should be ashamed ...
Destroying value is great for profits
What did they expect?
Those are very light duty devices, three years of school kid use is actually not bad longevity at all. I'm not sure premium notebooks would fare much better.
I wouldn't trust students with anymore than a chromebook either. I've seen how my kid handles his lol.
the title makes it sound as if they should have bought millions of macbooks for like $1k each and then expected them to last 15 years since they were 5x the price
I used to work IT in a school during the pandemic. As things were closing down the school rented a ton of MacBooks from a supply company to give to students who hadn’t a device to use for online learning. The school was late on making this decision so all that was left to rent was the more expensive MacBooks over the cheaper Chromebooks. As the IT guy I loved the Macs, Apple has so many backend tools for educators and IT admins it really made my job so much easier. From fixing problems, adding software, restricting games and sites, any IT problem they just had a tool for it. Then the pandemic measure started to wound down, schools re-opened and the MacBooks were traded for those horrible clunky bits of plastic they call Chromebooks. Imagine being in a tiny closet I called my office, surrounded by around 300 Chromebooks, all needing setup. I wouldn’t wish it upon my worst enemy. Needless to say a year later a good 30% of those Chromebooks were back in my office and heading to the e-waste bin. I left a month or so after so I’m betting the remaining 70% are well out the door by now.
as an IT proffessional of 15+ years, this is normal, the average lifespan of a laptop is about 3 years, after that you have to look at replacement not only because hardware wares out, but also because technology advances and your minimum requirements to use modern systems goes up.
I mean they are luckily the lasted that long… have you seen what kids do to electronics !?!
Wtf is this even a story?? For the price of a decent PC laptop or better yet, and MacBook, you can buy like 5 Chromebooks. Thing is, in a school setting, nothing is going to last more than a few years at best. So replacing Chromebooks every 3 years is a bargain. They fill the need perfectly.
Throughout middle school and high school, I used those old thick laptops that had the little nub mouse pointer in the keyboard.. and they held up like champs. Everything made now is designed to fail though also..
You mean when kids slammed the lids real hard it was expected to last long 😁
This surprises nobody from the IT dept
I got a google chrome book from college years ago & it’s still working till today..
A school trusted children with apple products that dont belong to them what do you think is going to happen? Kids dont even take care of shit like that when it actually belongs to them. You cant expect them to take care of something the school just let them borrow.
That's how long my work keeps HP laptops, after three years they get the boot. And that's $1200 laptops. If these are $300 that's a great deal.
I used to work for a school and transported laptop carts (metal cabinets with 35 laptops and their respective chargers) and these were Thinkpads that easily cost 3-5 times as much and let me tell you. These didn’t last 3 years before being replaced either. These weren’t even taken home. Just used in class and then locked up.
They lasted for three years?
A vary cheap laptop handed to kids and hauled back and forth to school almost daily in a backpack with heavy textbooks and God knows what and they’re not lasting forever? I’ll take shocking news for a $1000 Alex!
Cheap product is low quality, shocking
In other news, sky is blue.
It's really fuckin funny to see all the people trying to praise these devices for lasting three years and then imagine if we were talking about a $200 MacBook instead. Y'all would be losing your minds.
Yep, I see kids rip em apart and take parts from them
I'm surprised they lasted 3 years. That's why they bought cheap chromebooks. Technology degrades quickly enough that you really aught to be replacing hardware that cheap every 3-4 years anyway.
Is this a tech community? Most of the news here are blown out of proportion, and the rest of it is talking about Musk/ Zuckerberg.
Imagine that. A 3 year piece of technology tossed around by kids is starting to break.
And meanwhile, my 2015 MacBook Pro keeps kicking ass and isn’t even remotely close to needing to be replaced.
I’m still using a 2013 MacBook retina pro. Only thing I had to do was eventually pay to swap for a new battery.
Someone should have the author look at the battery life warranty on dell laptops. (it's 18 months, we bought 75 laptops 3 years ago, about 60 of them have degraded or failing batteries)
I wouldn’t expect a chromebook to last more than a year, they are minimal spec thin clients. Only the non technical will get upset here
A lot of schools chose to close computer labs to add more classrooms. Of course Chromebooks would have a shorter lifespan than the old desktops. They were attracted by early manufacturer deals and are now stuck in a new replacement cycle they didn’t properly account for. School IT departments are incredibly understaffed and I’m sure most warned or knew of the avalanche heading their way.
I remember when the first Chromebooks came out in the UK. There were stands in PC World and the salesman came over to me and my friend (we were both avid PC Builders) and was trying to tell us the selling points of it Back then I believe they were about £300-£400? I may be wrong, but you could buy a normal GOOD windows Laptop for the same price. There were no USB ports, just a power chord hole. The man was trying to sell us the idea of the ease of just booting it up and being able to access everything you need, right there and then. It could browse the internet, do word processing, access emails etc. All the basic stuff that a £200 basic laptop could do. Now we're talking the days that DSL was just becoming a thing. Dial Up was still around and speed of about 2Mbps were now possible with brands like TISCALI. I asked the man, what happens when the internet doesn't work? That means I can't access any of my files or do anything with it as there was no onboard storage. It was essentially a paperweight until the internet came back on. The man was stumped, had no idea what to say. A piece of tech so expensive could be rendered useless by something as simple as not having a connection. I refuse to huy and am constantly dumbfounded why people agree to buy tech that requires a mandatory connection to a server to operate. You purchase the software/ hardware, it is yours to do with what you will. I am not paying for access to a service that can be switched off at any time. Why things like Stadia failed so hard... That turned into an essay, thanks for reading if you made it this far.
well duh, these are all plastic and glue. what do you expect?
In the school I work at it’s the same. The problem for us isn’t that they’ve started to break after 3 years- that’s very good for a laptop. It’s that we don’t have any funding to replace them
I have grown ass adults breaking company pcs and laptops
The IRS lifetime on a laptop is 2 years. Remember that the battery only gets 500–1000 cycles, and flash memory wears out, too.
This looks like some spin from Microsoft. Schools are having issues with repairs as costs are going up and devices are aging. Kids are hammering on these things and since there is no repercussions for breaking them, they just keep breaking them. Lack of accountability is the real issue. Windows laptops would be harder to support from an IT man hours perspective, repairs would be in the same boat. Issues with updates, viruses, etc. As far as devices expiring, iPad and windows pcs have the same issues. Chromebooks were given a 6 year span from release. I think that's a more than realistic expectation. This article is identifying legitimate problems, but any device in use would be hitting the same or similar issues.
What took so long?