Enshittification

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.

I think it's a bit harsh to lay all the blame on google, considering the iPad exists.

Same shit different bucket.

They're all to blame

I just bought one of these for $35 dollars and put Linux mint on it

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.

walled gardens... so... just like Apple did, decades earlier?

Chromebooks didn't do shit.

It was tablets and phones replacing the home computer. Apple are equally complicit in this.

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'.

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 Skills always become outdated because of that.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.

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.

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.

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

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...!"

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

Not with chrimebooks, with android

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.

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.

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.

Now do cars.

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

1. 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.

2. 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.

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.

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.