If they would offer a reasonable replacement program, I bet they could make a strong case to EDU. The nice thing about Chromebooks is when a kid spills something on it, it's cheap to replace and to get back up and running. A tight EDU iCloud restore and reasonable replacement cost could definitely make this an attractive option for some school districts as this will last for a kid's entire school career.
> The nice thing about Chromebooks is when a kid spills something on it, it's cheap to replace and to get back up and running.
Is this actually a problem though? For my kids you either pay for the insurance plan at the start of the year, or you're responsible for the full cost of replacement.
There are obviously exceptions made for qualified low-income households but otherwise I don't know why they school would particularly care what replacement cost is if it's passed onto the family.
And I'm guessing those schools have never had Apple products and never will.
It turns out "every school district in America" probably wasn't the target they were shooting for. And frankly even if they do have a cheap replacement plan, schools that are 100% low income aren't spending $500 per student on a laptop, they'll be buying the cheapest chromebooks they can find if they provide any takehome option at all.
Well, exactly. A lot of comments in this thread are 'these will take back the education market' when in reality it will just slightly extend it to a slightly lower income demographic than the upper middle class districts that use Apple now.
I think most people are talking about individuals purchasing them for college, not necessarily middle/high schools assigning them. Maybe they could get them cheaper in bulk.
FWIW, my son has a 2020 M1 Air with 8gb and it runs just fine still. 8gb in the Mac world is much different than 8gb in the Windows world. Also, I am guessing most of the Chromebooks currently used in schools are running 4gb. If you need more ram, go up to an Air... reality is this will work fine for most kids and casual browsing scenarios.
It's not wrong, it just only works if you stick to the native apps, which you probably should do on a Mac.
The problem is when you start throwing half the modern tech stack crap on top which is built on standalone browser engines. They are NOT memory or CPU efficient compared to native apps. Really kills a nice machine dead.
End Amazon overnight and see what the response is from the people. What I don’t get about these guys is that they have their OWN power base - their customers. Just look at the leverage TikTok had because of their users
> What I don’t get about these guys is that they have their OWN power base - their customers
What do you not get about these guys? It's very simple. The likes of Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos are the exact same as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. The last two are just louder about it. They have their own power base, but relying on it doesn't maximize their wealth. In a best case scenario, they could achieve maybe 50% of the wealth by relying on their own power base, compared to kowtowing to The Party. They don't want 50%, they want 100%, and there's absolutely nothing that they won't do for it.
If they actually incentivized a group to support stability and continuity among enterprise customers, they would probably be able to diversify their revenue away from ads. Microsoft understands this…
The real sick thing is it doesn't matter, right? Like we're commenting on an article about how they won the day yesterday and Cloud revenue continues to skyrocket.
To be clear, I agree with you, and am puzzled by the lack of consequences from the real world for the stuff I saw. But that was always the mystery of Google to me, in a nutshell: How can we keep getting away with this?
A large part of that is the Google-are-super-geniuses PR effort. Anyone pointing out that Google's products don't reflect this to their boss faces having their own credibility reduced instead.
I don’t know… Travis Kalanick said he’s doing “vibe physics” sessions with MechaHitler approaching the boundaries of quantum physics.
"I'll go down this thread with GPT or Grok and I'll start to get to the edge of what's known in quantum physics and then I'm doing the equivalent of vibe coding, except it's vibe physics"
How would he even know? I mean he's not a published academic in any field let alone in quantum physics. I feel the same when I read one of Carlos Ravelli's pop-sci books, but I have fewer followers.
Also, the decadence of the American people is contributing a lot. Tough to find time to care when the average person is spending 2-4 hours staring at 10-30 second bursts of entertainment. It’s depressing…
The top 10% income bracket is a household income of 234k. For a couple both making $150k each in salary, they are top 10% and paying out probably 40% of that in taxes. Elons stock probably added $200B to his net worth in the past year. He did not pay anything on it, however is able to use it as collateral to borrow against (that way he doesn’t even have to pay capital gains). The upper middle class pays most of the tax burden. And your point about services???? Elon may not take advantage of the head start program for his kids, but he sure benefited from government subsidies for electric cars (just like CEOs benefit from favorable legislation and regulation)
> however is able to use it as collateral to borrow against (that way he doesn’t even have to pay capital gains)
I really don't understand how borrowing against shares isn't counted as realizing the stocks. I mean, apart from rich people lobbying against it and such.
If I buy some stocks for $100 and sit on them until they're worth $1000, if I sell them for $1000 or take a $1000 loan against them, I've realized the $900 gain and I should pay taxes on that either way.
Because you paid taxes on something that's worthless, which is the argument against this kind of tax: the value is too dynamic and hard to determine.
If paid $1000 for the stock, then took a loan and paid interest on it, then paid taxes on the $900 gain, and now the stock is worth $0. Now all I get to take is a loss on the $100. Bad deal.
No, you also gambled that they'd keep or increase in value, potentially to get even more out of them in the future.
Again, if you didn't want to accept that risk you could have just sold the stocks instead of taking a loan.
This isn't much different from taking a loan against a house, and then due to external circumstances the house drops in value, say a landfill next door. You're not getting back the property tax you paid.
> Again, if you didn't want to accept that risk you could have just sold the stocks instead of taking a loan.
I could have reasons for not wanting to sell it. Maybe I don't want to boost up my income for the year and be subject to even more taxes or loss of benefits (i.e. ACA). Or maybe I want to keep the dividend stream.
It any case it's already overcomplicated, and I don't think we need to make it moreso by giving the govt another opportunity to take yet another slice of a transaction they had nothing to do with.
Not to mention, the lender that gave me a loan has to give the govt a slice of their income, which comes from me.
> This isn't much different from taking a loan against a house
The difference is that houses rarely lose 100% of their value. Normally they hold their value or thereabouts.
Trump hates wars started by other people as they are means to enhance his populist support. His recent comments on Canada, Greenland, Panama and Gaza show his true colors. He is more than willing to use the military - though a lot of it was blocked in his first admin by guys like Mattis, Pompeo, Kelly, Bolton. The crew around him now only exists to carry out his insane conquests.
This is why so many of us spent so much time trying to convince our friends and family that Trump 2.0 is dangerous and will shatter the current world order. I am sorry to all of our allies who are going to be hurt by this.
