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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Sustainable Tech
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Sabaidee, Welcome!
This is a community for promoting sustainability in tech and computing. This includes: understanding the impact that our tech/computing choices have on the environment; purchasing or re-using devices that are sustainable and repairable; how to properly recycle or dispose of old devices when it is beyond use; and promoting software and services that allow us to reduce our environmental impact in the long term, both at work and in our personal lives.
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Chromebooks are just budget-spec laptops. Hardware-wise, they ought to be fine for anything a K-12 student needs to do on a day-to-day basis (and for anything they can't do on it, it's probably a good teaching point for them to learn how to use a server or VM or cloud instance).
This is a business decision on Google's part because they sold the machines at low or negative profit in order to build what they thought would be an ongoing revenue stream for them, which has not seemed to materialize.
OTOH, the real questions should not be aimed at Google, as much as it was local schools who signed the contracts with them without considering the e-waste and other downstream effects of what they were signing up for. That's the sort of thing that I think needs to be factored into municipal and corporate purchasing: it's all focused on the immediate spend, not on the long-term cost (and in the case especially of a municipality, that should be the cost to the community at large).
But hey... I bet a lot of them are going to turn up on eBay. As in the 90s when corporations were turning over hardware every 18-24 months, someone else's poor decisionmaking can be a great subsidy for hobbyists. Not good for the planet, though.