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
243 comments
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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.
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Yeah it's a fucking abysmal take. More kids had access to the internet and computers because of Chromebooks, without them they'd have had nothing - maybe once an hour in the computer lab each week, assuming they even had one.
Prior to Chromebooks, the most a school could do was "a computer in every classroom". That was it, that was the ambition in the early 2000's and even then most schools failed.
What happened was tech companies made computers easier to use by hiding a lot of that complexity. And average humans were fine with that because shit should just work.
The arguments being raised here about a loss of skills are the same arguments boomers used against millennials because they didn't know how to do DIY and shit like that.
The blame is always squarely on the education system. That system is supposed to set kids up with the skills they need to make it in the wold and tech literacy is one of many, many areas that is hugely underserved.
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were fine with that because shit should just work.
This was Apple's literal marketing campaign when they were trying to make Macs popular again
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Before Chromebooks we had one aging computer lab that the entire school had to reserve and share. Kids never even learned to type. I was able to improve students typing ability before they hit High School.
Because we had Chromebooks (that I raised money for with fundraisers) my students were able to learn to use digital data logging of science experiments using probes, my students were able to learn to design websites, I was able to teach them programming basics using Scratch, I was able teach kids basic IT management since I created a team of kids to assist with tech problems students and teachers had with their technology. I taught them CAD with TinkerCAD, I taught them video editing, I taught them image editing, etc.
Chromebooks were amazing.
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Not to mention that Chromebooks are Linux (so can be modded for basically anything), but these days have official native support for sideloading any Linux distro you please. All it takes is a flashed USB drive and one button click, then you're totally unrestricted and out of ChromeOS.
If any kid wanted to, they could do that far easier than I could when I was in school. If they become adults, buy a Chromebook, and choose to do nothing with it other than watch YouTube, then it has absolutely nothing to do with the technology that was provided to them during school.
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official native support for sideloading any Linux distro you please.
I thought you had to remove a write protect screw and flash a custom firmware.
Have they stopped that now?
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The school doesn't let you do that. Because if you installed Linux you could install games, and then you might get distracted. Never mind the fact that YouTube is still completely available.
I looked into this back when I was in school and there was some weird workaround found by someone on reddit that essentially forced it to do a complete factory reset. I didn't want to get in trouble for doing that, and if I did that I wouldn't have been able to connect to the wifi anymore.
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Do you mean like booting off Linux or installing it? I was looking at installing Linux on Chromebooks and apparently it really depends on the model. Some have a physical screw that you open up the laptop and unscrew to install Linux.
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What did you jailbreak your ipod with, though? Was it a chromebook?
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Probably windows 🤮
I think there were jailbreaks that could be done on device, but if I remember correctly this wasn’t one of them. I forget the exact year/iOS version. I wanna say I jailbroke 3 iOS versions in a row, and at that point new things had captured my interest. Eventually I found myself captivated with frontend development.
You can find my latest work at https://blorpblorp.xyz/, the obviously best client for Lemmy and soon PieFed.
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What are the advantages of a jailbroken kindle? I’ve thought about it but there isn’t really anything I lack on mine.
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My motivation was mostly to ditch Amazon, but in the process I discovered ko reader is both better than Amazon’s reader and does a really good job turning PDFs into readable books.
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I jailbroke my Wii
Yeah I've done this too. Beyond easy. There's literally a website with step-by-step instructions. I imagine it's the same for Kindle, etc.
Googling how to jailbreak something is not the same as having an open and functional development environment.
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You don't need to have a dev environment in order to be considered "tech literate".
Just as a single example, an issue I've seen is that kids may not even understand what a file system is or how it works, because they're used to apps like Facebook or Google Drive which abstract away from the concept of a hard-drive, a User folder, file extensions, etc. Then they grow up putting photos on instagram, writing essays on Microsoft Word, and to them it's some unexplained internet magic. They never had first-hand experience with creating and modifying files on a local file system, and so they lack the understanding of what's going on behind the scenes.
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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.
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Being a CS major (even a good one) isn't a solid measure of tech literacy. CS still suffers from the "do this arbitrary thing so you can get credit"; along with other majors and American schools at large.
Actually I've seen first hand the dumbing down of curriculum in my CS program via my younger peers' stories, and helping them with their coursework. And it's 100% due to low tech literacy.
Edit: grammar.
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Not Android, Linux. I was trying to figure out why there are so few Android tablets and read that Google didn't have complete control with Android. That's why Samsung and HTC and others put their own overlay on it. They didn't want that for laptops/bigger devices, so for ChromeOS they locked it down and told the hardware manufacturers "no, it's ChromeOS. You can't fiddle with it. If you want to make Chromebooks, these are the minimum specs and this is the keyboard you must use. If not, fuck off."
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These kind of takes have the usual format of "anything a company does is bad" and is profit driven. They forget that there is something called marketing and optics behind it.
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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'.
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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.
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Chromebooks didn't do shit.
It was tablets and phones replacing the home computer. Apple are equally complicit in this.
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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.
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Yeah, and I feel like you could play around with javascript to make stuff happen in the browser on a chrome book, can't you?
I'm old enough that it was BASIC I played around with when I was a kid. Not a language I ever used since, but the important thing is to get a feel for logic, make some incredibly stupid choices when making a program and learn from that. If a kid wants to play around on a computer to make it do something they created, I think they'll find a way.
Also AI can be helpful when starting on a new language. Yeah I had to learn the hard way by googling stuff and getting the syntax wrong, and using a lot of guess work. There's still a learning curve before you just know the syntax without stopping to think or asking the AI, but it was that way before, it was just googling things you gotta do before you really know it. And before that a lot more trial and error to figure it out.
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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.
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I feel like this analogy is perfect, but not just for the reason you used it.
Car manufacturers making cars easier to use and require less maintenance is great. Your point in regards to people just not needing the old skills because of that is spot on.
But car manufacturers have also been making intentional design decisions to make accessing things under the hood require speciality tools or needlessly complex when it is needed. There are cars where you can't replace headlights without removing the whole front bumper assembly. That isn't the fault of the owner/user, and it's not a case of "improvements make old skills obsolete". It's design intentionally hostile to the goal of allowing owners to even attempt it themselves. Scummy as hell, and we should be holding these companies responsible.
Google has done and is doing the same thing with Chromebooks and Android. File system? Folders to organize my files? What?
And now we have people who don't know how to operate their car's headlights, and people who can't find files if they aren't in the "recent documents" list.
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For sure, taking control away from the users is terrible and scummy, but I think it's an entirely different issue, covered by "right to repair". A very small amount of people had the know how and the confidence to perform the repairs themselves even before this anti consumer practices became so widespread, so I don't think it's a huge factor in decrease of skill. I would say a much bigger factor is the fact that technology has become exponentially more complex. You can't just open up a radio and replace a vacuum tube, everything is a microchip now, and the soldering iron isn't gonna help much there. I guess eventually we will reach technology complexity and abstraction of such a level that no single person can hold the knowledge to "fix" it on their own.
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Yup. I'm teaching my son CAD/CAM with a 3d printer, low level programming and electronics with Arduino, he helps with mechanical and electrical repairs. Linux with the home server. Fishing, hunting, and camping. Wasn't ready this year for steers or chickens but hopefully will next year. Wife is teaching him how to cook, (I'm a decent cook, but she is amazing). Simple sewing. Basic carpentry. And so on.
School isn't going to teach him much of this, but we will.
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Wanted to say the same thing you said, but with actual literacy. Books exist, but the desire to be literate is not there.
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It's more like blaming bumper cars for not being actual cars. Sure, bumper cars are more reliable and simple to use but the "use" is severely limited.
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No, really, it was corporate social media, and also the smartphone (iphone particularly). They don't need to know anything anymore thanks to those two. I mean even MySpace had kids learning CSS at least.
"We used to make our own webpages...!"
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One of my first exposures to technology was an iPod touch, and I went on to become a software engineer. Maybe it was the time? Perhaps I’ve just become older and grumpier, but technology once felt inviting to me now feels oversaturated and unnecessary. Like do we really need ChatGPT? Does it really make things better or just solve other problems that technology created?
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Good, I’m glad nobody is learning these things anymore. I couldn’t care less if someone doesn’t learn HTML and CSS.
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Eh, I don't really agree.
To want to learn something starts with curiosity and the willingness to learn. I was always trying to fuck around with games and programs before I knew that modding was even a thing. When I was met with restrictions I always tried breaking them. I got around admin protection on school computers that literally only had access to the desktop.
My youngest brother on my dad's side (my family is complicated) is a shut-in who barely acts like the adult he's supposed to be, never owned a chromebook, and sits in front of the computer more than I even do. He is incredibly tech illiterate.
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Yeah it's a pretty bad take IMHO. When I was a kid we had one 386 desktop computer running MS-DOS. No laptops, phones or tablet. I always liked computers and when I went to high school I noticed a bunch of old broken computers in a storage room one day. Asked the computer teacher (we had computer classes learned MS Word and (blind) typing) if I could try to fix them. Me and a friend spend many luch breaks swapping parts, until about half of them worked again. Learning about something is mostly your willingness to learn. As a highschool kid I would have loved to get a laptop. If I had a Chromebook I'm fairly sure I would have tried to run a custom OS on it or see what else non standard thing I could have unlocked.
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If a kid is working with a 600mhz CPU in 2025, what can they realistically do with that Chromebook other than figure out how to get past a firewall? I remember 2nd hand stories of kids bringing in USBs with cracked minecraft or quake, or screwing around with windows themeing and other nonsense. Now, thats gone. You get a browser, and a file manager. No themes, sometimes no access to even change the wallpaper, all in googles little sandbox. I think this post is somewhat accurate but leaves out the role iPhones play in tech ilitteracy
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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.
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I've found that with my "pre gen x" (born in the 60s, does that make her a boomer?) mother, she seems to have really bought in to all the old "computers make everything easy!" marketing, so when whatever she wants to do isn't she just kind of gives up. Also ties into her not understanding the value of my career (sysadmin).
To her, computers aren't complex tools that may take some skills and training to utilize properly, they're "press the button to make it do exactly what I want" and when that doesn't work she gets very frustrated.
That, plus she has had just enough exposure to computers in the 90s that she still on some level sees them as very easy to irreperably break expensive luxury items, so when she is rarely willing to work for it then she's afraid to poke around in menus because she thinks she could break it permanently.
And to be fair, if you don't set up your laptop using "cattle, not pets" strategies, it can be easy to get four levels deep in a menu and tweak some shit that fucks up an entire program. Then your option is to remember what you did to revert it, or just blow the damn thing out and reinstall (if it actually clears settings on uninstall, not a given).
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How old do you think GenX is?! We had the first home computers, learned the PC as it hit the market.
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Not OP, but wanted to chime in.
I get the sentiment Some Gen Xers did grow up with home computers. However, I suspect those people are outliers due to both the cost and general user friendlyness. In the late 90s it seemed like everyone had a home computer, even the normies. This let their kids grow up messing around
It almost seems like we're heading back in this direction, where normies have moved on to phones and tablets because they "just work". I don't think the average kid will grow up as immersed in computers as I did unless their parents are intentionally about making that introduction. I bought my kid a used Thinkpad for Christmas last year. Most of his peers have tablets or just stick to their smartphone.
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You didnt learn anything hitting the market unless you were well off, significantly.
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I was thinking of my own experiences, but that's why I said "often." I personally find that older people who use tech are honestly much better than other generations when it comes to it. My grandma has been into tech from the jump and she blows my mom out of the water when it comes to tech skill. But I find that the ones who were not interested have a hard time catching up. Mostly because it all happened so fast
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that's the problem but the blame can also be squarely placed on us Millennials. Like you said when we were younger and older people had tech issues they'd hand it to us assuming we "get it" but we didn't. we had to learn it by teaching ourselves. We taught ourselves how to write html, css, etc via Geocities and Myspace. We taught ourselves how to build computers or learned via tv shows like The Screensavers or Call for Help or just by reading PC magazines. AND THEN we decided since we taught ourselves all these solutions and what have you that we'd make it easier for future generations. We developed apps and tools that "just work" no tinkering needed, no customization needed, those are predefined settings. And we're not teaching kids, we're providing them with OUR solutions. Like you said we assume they "just get it" because we had to just get it. We didn't have a choice. If we wanted a custom internet or tech experience we had to do it ourselves.
Today those options are provided because we provided it for them. They don't need to be as tech literate as we had to be because we made things easier for them.
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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.
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The real take is to get kids into PC gaming from a young age. Kids are super patient with each other and now my kid is doing things like installing mods for games that he plays. It's also massively improved his reading which is mostly how I learned English myself.
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I can thank Minecraft for making me learn how to use the computer because I wanted to install mods and for learning English because Minecraft let's plays were like crack to 10 year old me and basically all of them were in English
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Probably a great way to get them comfortable with pc hardware too - want that new GPU? Here you go. Install it, you just get the one so be careful and learn how to do it right.
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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)
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I feel like this has way more to do with smartphones and apple than chromebooks but sure.
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I work in education. The chromebooks at my school replaced the convential computer lab where kids would learn how to actually use the computer.
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Exactly, otherwise this problem would be almost exclusive to places that had this Chromebook program. Brazil as a whole had no such program, yet lots of people have no fucking clue what to do on phones besides "install app, run app"
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Yeah a decade ago is not where this problem started. Nothing points to these Chromebooks. Smart phones are a good choice but also just the homogenization of the internet from like 2005-2012 as kids stopped having to figure out how to navigate the internet and install programs, instead staying on two to three websites and everything being installed as an app.
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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.
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I don't know where people get this idea from. Kids are still hacking their school computers, just as much as we were back in the 90s. If anything, kids are more knowledgeable on bypassing these systems now than we were then; ask any school's IT admin, kids are doing wild shit with their computers and tablets.
Don't forget, people like you and I weren't "normal kids". We were a very stark minority. That's still the case with today's kids. I think you're just not seeing it because you either don't have children in your life that you are in regular communication with, or aren't present on the social platforms today's kids are on.
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And at the same time large sections of them are as tech illiterate as the boomers. There is a huge divide between the ones hacking everything and those that have only ever used an iPad or similar cloud-based devices and don't understand how even basics like folder structures works. And they sit right next to each other at school day after day in the same general classes.
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Basically this. None of our parents knew we were dumpster diving telephone exchanges or trying to figure out gaining root on server systems. Today's underground is equally obfuscated by the "don't tell the grown ups" as we were.
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My first computer was a DOS machine at the age of 5, and I grew up along side the PC, learning each iteration of operating system in real time as they were released. I have a hard time imagining anyone ever getting that good a window into how computers work, passively, just from using them normally. All the weird shit I did was entirely on top of what was already a rock solid foundation.
Just wish a social life hadn't been the sacrifice paid for that education.
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I still did that in the 2010s tbh. Though I was a dying breed admittedly
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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.
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chromebooks suck but this isn't really why
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Thank you. It started long before chromebooks were a thing. If anything, we can blame it on windows. I remember people of my generation not understanding any tech from the mid 90s on...
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People have not understood tech forever, but the 90s and '00s probably had the highest rate of tech literacy. Modern OSes obfuscate the inner workings more than they used to, meaning everyday users are less exposed to them.
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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.
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I agree, and I think it takes almost MAGA level self-absorption to contrive this interpretation of events. What actually happened was somebldy wanted to sell products and came up with products people wanted. And that's not an all-encompassing endorsement of Google and everything Google has ever done because I'm "on Google's side", it's a criticism of OP's imagination.
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I think my kids are more accepting of Linux on the family PC because of their school chrome books. We'll see how it plays out when they start purchasing their own devices though.
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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.
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Back in my day we brought our own MS-DOS boot disks to school to circumvent all the limitations.
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For me it was Backtrack Linux on a bootable CD-RW. Set the Windows wallpaper as my background and nobody ever noticed. Man those were the days!
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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.
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A friend of mine is a teacher in training and he is currently teaching ~11 year olds about basic computer use (like Office programs) and a lot of his students weren’t sufficiently able to use a mouse in the beginning. Almost all of them have smartphones.
Also, they seem to lack the bite to get behind things themselves, if they don’t get something or if something doesn’t work like they think it should.
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It’s happening in countries where they are rare as well.
This 👆 OOP sounds like US defaultism.
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So the argument is that because Chromebooks just work and don't need troubleshooting unlike windows so this is Googles fault
OK
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No, the argument is that Chromebooks are so limited in what they can offer that kids never learned to do anything out of using the chrome browser.
Turns out you don't need to worry about troubleshooting something if you just remove that functionality lol
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Most Chromebooks offered Linux on them. Even Linus Torvalds used a Chromebook when travelling to develop via it. Presumably because he was sick to death of "troubleshooting" when he had other, better things to do. And presumably schools and teachers also have better things to do than deal with bs like conflicting packages, missing drivers, viruses or whatever on every kid's device.
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A certain group of Boomer-brains are heavily invested in the idea that Millennials are the only generation that knows how to use computers.
So we've been seeing a lot of "blame the X for the Y" agitprop that's increasingly divorced from reality. It's just the next generation of outrage porn, tailored towards the current generation of 40 year olds.
FOX News ran the same bullshit content for GenXers and Boomers.
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They don't need to know how computers work if Chromebooks are the only thing in existence.
They also don't need to know how to deal with python dependencies if they can pace their code into AI and say why isn't tkinter working?
Craftsmrn said the same thing about the industrial revolution.
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That's honestly technology in a nutshell. Technological development leads to further abstraction, leading to less low level knowledge. It's always been this way. Is AI an abstraction step too far, or are we just the next generation of old man yelling at cloud?
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You know how you know even less about computers? When you cannot afford one at all
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walled gardens... so... just like Apple did, decades earlier?
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And that google has been copying for a bit over a decade now
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They're all to blame
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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
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I just bought one of these for $35 dollars and put Linux mint on it
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$35 is impressive. My old Chromebook cost $80.
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I just searched “cheap old laptop” on Amazon. Probably got lucky tho
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Apple did the same thing in the 80s and 90s. Then schools eventually said "no thanks" and switched to PCs for all the computer labs.
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The switch to PCs did happen in the late 90's but not reacting to some walled garden from Apple.
In the 80's, schools saw computers as a tool to teach general skills to students. The Apple II was a machine to run Number Munchers and Oregon Trail on. Especially for younger kids, "computer skills" weren't really taught.
By the late 90's the tide had shifted. Computer literacy was becoming a requirement in more and more jobs, and IBM with their Microsoft-based PCs and the ecosystem they accidentally created had a massive grip on the business world. So schools needed to start teaching classes in Windows and Office.
Apple made a big comeback with their pivot to the fashion and jewelry industry but never recaptured the hold on education they once had.
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I would say in the 80s, we were taught computer skills as a foundation for using computers to learn more general skills.
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Like this wasn't Apple's fault. Remember that ad where the kid doesn't know what a "computer" was?
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Apple famously worked very hard to put iMacs into elementary schools. Back before laptops were cheap and schools still had "computer labs."
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To be fair, back when the first computer labs came around in schools, the only thing really available was the Apple II. Nothing else was terribly useful for teaching how to use a computer. It was only later in the 80s that the IBM PC came around and took over for a while.
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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
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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.
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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
- 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.
- 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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Schools setup their Windows machines in the same way. There is (for a rule abiding student) hardly any difference between a locked down Windows system and a Chromebook.
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And the locking down is probably way better. When I was a kid we could just stick a cracked copy of halo on a flash drive and play with our friends after school using the school's local network.
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Bruh even before Chromebooks it was only a select few geeks that pursued anything more than word processing.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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As someone who lives and works online. I wish.
It seems super consolidated, right up until you start listing the "handful" of big vendors that run the Internet..... You get passed the first 3 or 4 big players and end up with a long list of "of yeah, these guys too"....
Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, CloudFlare, valve (and every other game publisher), Netflix, PayPal, Uber, Spotify, Apple, Yahoo (yes, they still exist), xitter, Rackspace, zoom, Dropbox, Etsy, Pinterest.....
The list is super long.
And that's just companies that people would have heard of. The companies that actually make the Internet work is a much longer list, and GoDaddy plays a surprisingly large role as well. There's also entire business sectors that most people aren't aware of, for network transit services, and interconnects.
It's a pretty deep topic.
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I completely agree. I think people mean more like in the scope of basic tasks kids aren’t meant to be doing on computers in school. That’s been basically wrangled into Google and Amazon at this point with a handful outlying things. If you’re doing anything else though, the scope definitely broadens, and you can make it broaden more if you try to eliminate the bigger guys.
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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
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This sounds more like my experience as well. Instead of the walled garden of Chromebook, it was more the walled garden of iOS.
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Apple did the same thing for the longest time with schools. If you had the interest to fuck with computers you would definitely hack whatever they had. Most schools were not good at IT.
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We definitely didn’t know the district admin password and definitely didn't have a group of trusted friends around the school who would maintain a level of shenanigans on the computers without going too far to give away we had full unbridled access to any resource connected to the network. We definitely didn’t send system messages to teachers’ terminals in various different rooms and definitely didn’t bypass gaming lockouts to play doom and other games during class. There definitely wasn’t a day where every library printer started printing entire reams of paper with nothing on them after every bell rang for the day.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In addition, carts of MS Windows computers (before everyone went 1-to-1) were not great in the classroom - students would save documents to the C drive and then the next day, on a different computer, they shockingly couldn't find their documents. When my school had a legacy MS windows cart and a couple of Chromebook carts, the students would groan and grumble if their class ended up getting the MS Windows cart.
Also, because MS Windows had (and still has) much higher hardware requirements, the MS Win computers were much more expensive AND time consuming for the techs to maintain. Couldn't really justify throwing out and replacing a $1000 computer (back in the day). A $200 Chromebook, no big deal. And, with 1-to-1, we can try to get the parents to pay to replace a broken Chromebook. I don't think we could ask them to replace a much more expensive MS Windows computer.
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I added that a factory reset was dead easy. Don't have to call in techs to troubleshoot and run fixes, reinstall things, lock everything down again. Just factory reset and you're done.
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Monied interests have been destroying education for 4 decades. Google joined the party late, but they’ve certainly done their damage.
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Now do cars.
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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.”
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WorldEdit...
I hope he finds it a game changer.
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Oh yeah, mods and crazy maps and worldedit, he will be all over it.
I guess I’ll need to install it on my PC too, so I can visit his amusement parks, zoos, and haunted houses.
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Seeing kids nowadays fail at basic computer stuff is so disheartening.
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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.
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Steve jobs is mot blameless here.
But yes.
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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.
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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.
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My son currently has a Chromebook with Linux, wine, steam. Not sure if your argument checks out.
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A school laptop with all that?
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I believe it. My nephew found out how to dual-boot Linux on his school Chromebook so that he could run some music creation software on it. Kids are smart.
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Nope, personal one. School stuff is lame.
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This goes from all directions. Even with Windows now Windows 11 comes with DRM.
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The laptops in 2026 will all have AI integrated into the hardware. It will be dependent on the AI in the cloud servers.
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Finally someone who is sane & smart
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Thankfully, My third world country was too poor to afford Chromebooks, so we had to rely on regular PCs
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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.
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Ah yes, a vast increase in the accessibility of computers actually made people less tech literate. This whole "gen-z can't computer like me" crap is just millennials entering into their juvenoia phase. I guess we're all just damned to become boomers, old and scared.
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I think it's a legitimate concern. For car ownership, even after it became mainstream, people had a rough idea of how cars worked. There was an engine, brakes, tires, etc.
With computers, I don't think the average user has that same level of understanding. I could do some basic diagnosis if my car broke down, people can't do that on their computer.
Granted it's more abstract and changes more frequently than a car, but I think the average users is capable of learning basic debuging and should if they're on a computer or smartphone for a large fraction of their day. We just don't ask that if them and hermetically seal computer systems.
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Ehh in the same way boomers claim millennials are dumb because they can't fix everything about their cars themselves, millennials complain that gen z is dumb because they can't do everything with computers themselves. In both cases the underlying argument is flawed. Each generation is just as capable as the last it's just the skills that are more useful to each changes over time. The reality is learning how to rip and burn a cd isn't as important to know how to do now as it was 20 years ago. Same as knowing how to change your own oil isn't as important as it used to be.
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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.
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Who cares about any of that? I didn’t see a single problem.
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This is LITERALLY the most regarded take one could have about Chromebooks
What's next, you want to gatekeep education as well?
Voting?
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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.
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You seemed to miss their argument. Those were the standard in 1995, before OSes had really integrated the internet. Haivng a floppy disk, discarding wifi, and having drivers auto-loaded/discovered automatically (or not needed at all) are independent developments. Even when Chromebooks started becoming standard: using drivers from physical disks were rare, Windows could automatically find and update drivers (how well, eh), WiFI existed and was faster than most internets. You could install Linux and it would mostly work, provided your hardware wasn't too new.
The actual argument chromebooks are contributing to tech illteracy because, they're:
- Locked-down: devices that most can't repair or customize, especially if given out by a school or organization. Locking them down is a feature.
- Below cost: they're the cheapest devices available, because Google makes more money from data.
Organizations buy these devices because they're cheap (than cost), lock them down, and those locked-down devices become the only computer for most students. While it's technically possible to install Linux, these users can't: it's not their devices: the organizations bought them because they were cheap and easily locked down for kids. If these are their main device, and they not allowed (either technically or by policy) to install another OS: where will they learn tech literacy? Not on their phone, not on their tablet, and not on their school-issued laptop.
They've been locked into a room and people wonder why they don't know how to interact outside. You're arguing that the room today is better than the one in 1995. That's true, that doesn't change the argument:
- Maybe they shouldn't be locked into the room.
- Maybe it shouldn't be cheaper to lock the room than to let them go outside.
- Maybe we need to do more to help them see outside the room.
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Universities were already locking down their PCs in the 90's, at least those with competent IT departments - BIOS password, locked boot menu, Windows 2000 with restricted user accounts. If you don't do that, your every PC will have 15 copies of Counter Strike and a bunch of viruses in one week.
Chromebooks (and laptops in general) are way cheaper now than PCs were back then, so again, you need to buy your own and install a proper OS, the situation did not really change.
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No student would be able to do that on a school issued chromebook.
Edit: I'm assuming. I could be wrong.
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Not with chrimebooks, with android
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Google provided Chromebooks below cost to schools... for profit. Gotcha screenshot person, great point.
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My sibling in Talos, are you entirely unfamiliar with the concepts of 'loss leaders', 'rent seeking/Software as a Service' and 'hooking them while they're young'?
Every single one of those is common place in the digital world these days, and this is no exception. By getting these devices in the hands of kids for less than the cost of the device, you can affect what services they choose to use in the future (by making them already familiar with your product by the time they can choose for themselves) and setting them up to live in your walled garden and making them pay a premium to stay in (see also, the Apple model).
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The hardware manufacturers (because that's separate from Google) are not producing hundreds of thousands of Chomebooks at a loss. Chromebooks are cheap because they don't need much hardware because ChromeOS is lightweight.
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Oh yes, because without the Chromebook, people would stop Googling stuff. Are you familiar with the concepts of "context" and "numbers matter"?
Also, Google doesn't even have a walled garden, in fact their products barely work together.
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Nah, the sheer complexity of modern computers and the endless proliferation of OSes, languages, protocols, make it impossible to have any kind of tech literacy.
Magic machine makes pictures, I click and order things.
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I am pretty sure that a base level of tech literacy is something that is not "impossible". Sure your average user may not be willing or able to get there, but I am pretty well immersed in the tech world and have a working knowledge on most of the important platforms and concepts.
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I'm just old and tired of the endless treadmill of changes for things that do the same things.
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I think it's a bit harsh to lay all the blame on google, considering the iPad exists.
Same shit different bucket.
I'd argue the iPad is the bigger offender personally. They're blaming Chromebooks because that's often what schools provided, but the same exact timing existed before with iMacs in classrooms all through the 90s and early 00s for millennials despite Windows being by far the more common real world OS they would need to know in the workplace.
But when it comes to portable devices the iPhone and iPad are king, that's what young people want and often what they're given. And those operate nearly exactly the same as a Chromebook. Toss everything into a cloud bucket, no user-facing folder structures to learn, everything locked down with limited access and customization. A take it or leave it approach to user interaction.
I have user-facing folder structures on every iOS device I own. What exactly is the extent of your personal experience using iOS?
Just to get this straight: you're comparing the complexity of using OS X to Chrome OS. I hope you're not also claiming you've actually used both of these?
Edit: also, what do you mean "no user-facing folder structures to learn"? iPadOS I get because even though it has one and has for years, it's not required. But again: have you ever used Chrome OS? I would sooner use TempleOS, and somehow you still managed to make an invalid criticism of such a dogshit operating system.
Edit 2: 23 downvotes; 0 explanations of how I'm wrong. Stay classy, Lemmy.
It is more basic than that:
"It just works" is terrible for developing computer skills.
It is damned convenient for the most part, but it removes the opportunity to have an issue and solve it, developing your troubleshooting skills.
Then we come to the lack of verbosity of modern operating systems and programs.
"Oops, there is an issue, please wait while we solve it..." is an absolutely terrible error message.
"Error 0x001147283b - Fatal error" is a far better error message.
I agree with the the sentiment of your comment, but I think both error codes aren't great.
I want error logs or descriptions, not a cryptic code that the Company selling the OS can choose not to document publicly.
Have you ever worked in an environment powered by Windows-based computers, and Microsoft software? Have you ever spoken with any user in such an environment about their experience with errors like the ones you described, and how easy or difficult it was to solve them?
Until you search that error code and it doesn't tell you anything useful.
Also, the total number of Chromebooks sold worldwide is tiny compared with phones and tablets. Most kids have probably never seen a Chromebook, but virtually every kid has held and used a phone, a tablet or both.
If you want to blame Google, blame Android, not Chromebooks.
Yeah Apple was pushing their "BSD for morons" laptops om schools long before chromebooks were a thing.