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Built-in software ‘death dates’ are sending thousands of schools’ Chromebooks to the recycling bin
(www.mercurynews.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Technology
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You're saying it's over a million dollars to revive some chromebooks? Or to build out a system that is independent from planned obsolescence? For a school district that has to operate in the long term, I think one of those is a bargain.
Also, the cost of maintaining 2 vs 1000 systems obviously scales up, but it's obviously not nearly linear. The difference in cost between managing 1000 and 2000 systems would be negligible.
The plan on a large scale with a team sounds good, but IT at schools is a total mixed bag due to budget, etc. I’ve seen some schools where IT is just burnt out and underpaid (can’t tell which came first) and sometimes the IT team will be an old head that still reminisces about Windows NT.
It would be cool if there was an independent team that resurrected those laptops for schools. I think the problem that arises though is security.
Right, for a huge enterprise they would probably honestly consider it, but a school with ~1000 students? Less? It's going to be cheaper to trash those and get new ones. Don't get me wrong I think it's a terrible waste and Google is horrible for putting them in this situation, and I'd love for the open source community to offer some scripts for wiping, installing ubuntu, setting up ACLs, connecting to a domain, connecting shares, etc, but still most schools are going to see this and just say "Okay google how much money do you need for us to keep working?"