Enshittification

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.

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)

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.

Thankfully, My third world country was too poor to afford Chromebooks, so we had to rely on regular PCs

Back in my day we brought our own MS-DOS boot disks to school to circumvent all the limitations.

They're all to blame

Now do cars.

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.

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

chromebooks suck but this isn't really why

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

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

I feel like this has way more to do with smartphones and apple than chromebooks but sure.

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.”

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.

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.

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.