Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Tech Tip: Kids Destroy Computers”.
Let’S talk about the mountain to dead, Chromebooks yeah. I think this is interesting. I think you’re being a hater right now. So I’m going to make you read, the topic sounds good struggle with mountains of dead Chromebooks.
During the pandemic, American schools bought a massive number of Chromebooks. According to a recent report, those schools now have a massive number of unusable devices unusable. I’M your hype, man in part because of the obvious achievements of the materials, but also because the devices are hitting the end of their security updates.
Officially Chromebooks get five to eight years of updates five to eight years, but their Auto expiration date is determined by when the device was certified. Not when it was sold. Google tells users to expect an average of four years.
Four years at time of sale after Chromebooks passed that expiration date, they can no longer access secure websites, including State testing sites. Okay, pointless changes to basic parts between different models make the Chromebooks difficult to repair. For example, six different manufacturers of the Chromebook 11 made cosmetic changes to the plastic bezel that made Parts incompatible between models.
Luckily or not, many schools have large stockpiles of busted Chromebooks to salvage parts from, but Salvage is inefficient by Design yeah. Usually, if a Chromebook has a single broken key, the entire keyboard needs to be replaced. One school official reported that a typical repair involves replacing half the device yeah. There was an interesting anecdote from Wednesday’s Tech linked episode where Gideon Fraser commented fun. Fact. After having worked as a hardware Tech guy in a Georgia school, I can go ahead and tell you that these Chromebooks are actually closer to 90 US dollars a piece and these kids obliterate them. If a key is bad, you can go to the back room filled to the brim, with broken Chrome books, look for one with a functional keyboard and part match. Actually, you do that with every fixable component on these god-awful machines.
We don’t really Buy Any Part Parts Replacements, because we already have enough broken ones that we should have any part we would need. That would actually be a viable to fix and then another person responded as well as a fellow Tech in Texas. I can confirm those damn screens are just constantly coming in shattered this just in kids, not careful with their things, especially when they aren’t their things. Yeah more at 11., yeah um – I don’t think them breaking often would be different if it was a Chromebook or not, I actually don’t either.
I think the kids would be very likely to break school-owned laptops, regardless of whether they were Chromebooks or MacBooks or Windows books. I used to get so enraged at how people would treat the computers in the like the lab computer. You and your friends built yeah like, but even the ones that we didn’t, because, like we had such a low budget that like, if you break the optical drive in this thing, we don’t get another one, and people would be shoving like garbage. They would take like candy wrappers and put in the optical drive and shove.
It closed. Like I used to have a little tool. I would walk around with to be able to do the manual pop-out of optical drive, so I could pull them open and take trash out like it’s so annoying like don’t like, if you don’t destroy everything more of the budget, can go towards making this place. Nice yeah: can we stop like man, it used to be so frustrating, so I’m not surprised to people. It’S not surprised that people would trash these, so this is going to happen with whatever and I don’t believe, most laptop keyboards that I know of have like user user, repairable, individual keys.
So like a lot of these complaints, I’m I’m coming down on. Like I don’t know, if I can rag on the Chromebook for this, no, it’s not Chromebook specific, but what is very frustrating is the fact that these devices will expire that, yes, on average in four years yeah I mean I just bought a Chromebook for my middle Child because uh she needs it for school next year and I’m sitting here going well. I didn’t think to check if it was certified like yesterday or a year ago or two years ago or four years ago, it’s Modern Hardware. So probably it was certified fairly recently, but I didn’t think to check that and I can see how that would be exactly the sort of thing that, whether it’s a parent or whether it’s a buyer for a school district or whatever else, there’s so many other factors To consider other than when the device was certified that honestly, I I just I straight up, think that this should just be illegal and laptops are better now they’re like when I was kind of late High School, it was General wisdom that if you bought a laptop It lasted three years yeah within three years. It was going to be crap anyway. That’S not really a thing.
That’S not true! You could buy a ThinkPad, that’s 10 years old on like eBay. You know, like that’s core, this second gen core third gen core. I mean. Oh, I mean fourth gen core is almost 10 years old at this point and that’ll be very usable today. Is you can make sure that you get proper Security on it? You update the heck out of it and then you’re just like browsing the internet.
That’S fine who cares? So what is our justification for allowing this stuff to just expire this way and back to the part that I think should actually be illegal? Why are we allowing companies to continue selling these products well into their lifespan, knowing that what the customer is buying today is a significantly shorter shelf life than what they bought at the beginning of them? You should have to well, you shouldn’t really be able to do it all, but you should have to communicate like this. Device has 800 days left until it is garbage when you buy the things well, if you’re going to hard lock it like that, I mean, if it’s going to be a degraded experience. Okay, fine, you know, like apple, doesn’t roll out new Mac OS updates for their Max Forever. At some point, you do have to deprecate the hardware.
That’S that actually is fine. It would be enormously burdensome for them to have to support it forever. It’S not what I’m asking for someone in float. Plane chat, uh Mike d78 said I’m watching this show on a fourth gen I5 ThinkPad works, fine, exactly right, yeah and, and so what I’m? What I’m saying is knowing that, assuming the kids don’t beat the crap out of it, the hardware could still be good in more than four years or even more than five or eight years, it should be communicated, and this is something that I will often tell people When they’re shopping for a phone, when people ask me for advice for a phone, I almost never give an exact model. Because then it’s my problem, if they don’t like it yeah. But what I will do is I’ll give them some tech tips and one of the ones that I will really really try to emphasize is hey. You need to think about it in terms of total cost of ownership, and I know that that’s more of a business. The way of considering things but in our personal lives, it’s very applicable. If you buy a brand new iPhone today right, you can buy a brand new iPhone from the last generation.
It’S cheaper right, it’s also not as good, but a big part of the reason. It’S cheaper is not the hardware, it’s the support, so if the difference in price between uh, let’s just use arbitrary numbers between a thousand dollar iPhone and an 800 iPhone, okay is one-fifth, but that thousand dollar one is going to last for five years and that 800 One is going to stop getting support in four years. Guess what there the same? Do you want me to say it sure cost of ownership total cost of ownership? Exactly now, that’s not always true right.
It depends what kind of user you are. Are you the type of person that uses your devices into the ground? Well, okay, then, what I just said is very applicable, but if you’re the kind of person who’s going to upgrade in two years or three years anyway, then it becomes more of a question of well. Are the features important to you, as opposed to just the the total cost you’re going to pay per year of owning the device right because then all of a sudden they’re the same um in terms of their software expiry? So you so you start to move on to other factors, but it’s a really important thing to consider, especially with Android phones buying a year old, Android phone, particularly a few years ago, when they weren’t getting support. The same way that I mean Samsung does four years now. I think three, I don’t know yeah.
If you don’t mind, looking that up, it would be. That would be good to know, but there was a while there, where you know you were getting one. Two very rarely three major Android updates on your Android four years, four years yeah, so they do four years now at least um, but it wasn’t always that way and not all vendors have that level of commitment, and so, if you’re buying it a year into the Cycle don’t be fooled if it’s 20 off that ain’t, a deal you’re just you’re, just buying old Hardware at full price right for how long you’re going to be able to use it. So latest pixels are apparently five years now, which is which is really great and yeah. That’S it’s a major factor that you should consider.
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