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Google fucked a whole generation with Chromebooks, and now they're fucking the next generation with AI
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this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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Enshittification
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What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
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Just to get this straight: you're comparing the complexity of using OS X to Chrome OS. I hope you're not also claiming you've actually used both of these?
Edit: also, what do you mean "no user-facing folder structures to learn"? iPadOS I get because even though it has one and has for years, it's not required. But again: have you ever used Chrome OS? I would sooner use TempleOS, and somehow you still managed to make an invalid criticism of such a dogshit operating system.
Edit 2: 23 downvotes; 0 explanations of how I'm wrong. Stay classy, Lemmy.
Huh? I used ChromeOS and Mac OS for work, study and play and I can't honestly say one is particularly more simplistic or even user-friendly (dumbed-down) than the other. But ChromeOS is significantly less locked down overall in that getting root access on the device is much, much simpler.
This is such an unserious strawman of an argument, how do you not get embarrassed writing this?
There's no official tutorial for most Android devices either, it doesn't mean it's harder to do than on Apple devices.
Just saying something is so doesn't make it so, to demonstrate my premise is untrue you have to actually demonstrate how it's untrue, which you have not done.
You mean like how Mac OS is locked to the Mac OS App Store by default only, featuring mainly proprietary payware unless you toggle an obscure bypass in the settings, while ChromeOS lets you run any unsigned code for ChromeOS, Linux and Android with minimal effort, all of which are either fully or partially open source and comes with a web browser equipped with a nice set of easily accessible Dev tools, which allows you to examine and learn how web applications are written, architectured and deployed - the largest by far aspect of computer science and software development most people come into contact with regularly?
Even if the conversation was about what you say, you would still be wrong. But it's not about that, because in a school scenario both would be locked down with an MDM - in Apple's case literally via serial numbers and network connectivity DRM you can't realistically block.
And no, this conversation is actually not about that either. A user repairable device doesn't become less repairable if it discourages your 12 year old from popping out and eating the battery.
Any examples on this one, chief? Or you just saying things like that will magically make them true again?
Of course it does. Really it's the thing that matters the most.
Sorry but your bailey castle isn't any more secure than your motte, because access to root is actual freedom over your device, anything less than actual unrestricted root access where I can say, replace the network stack or write and add my own kernel modules for hardware support I want to add or whatever reason I please is by definition not really software (and by extension hardware) I have control over. It's just another blackbox walled garden.
Again, do you have any evidence at all to back that up?
And what's with this weird caveat?
It's some real specious reasoning to handwave the most core freedom of all - to simply replace/refuse the OS altogether and bring your own to your hardware, and highly convenient of course because Apple employs many anti-repair, anti-consumer, anti-modification practices from the very screws to their knock-off TPM (T2?) chip to hardware whitelists where everything is married down to the cables and each and every module for no reason other than to maintain control above all.
Please apply more intellectual rigor next time.
Fuck Google and fuck Apple, stop defending them, don't die on this silly hill and go be free.
Have you even been reading this thread? This is about the level of tech literacy kids get from using an OS for school, not about what you're theoretically capable of doing. Yes, you're right, root access on both macOS and Chrome OS would be locked out in a school setting. That makes your braindead argument a non-starter for this discussion. Even if what you said about the rooting difficulty were true (again, showed it isn't), it could not possibly matter less here. And yes, I am going to say that official, step-by-step documentation that takes a few minutes at most to follow is easier than following some third-party website and then resetting your entire OS.
Even in a situation where it's not locked down, neckbeards like you and I are in the vanishingly small minority of users who ever touch root access; when we're talking about generations of people being raised to be tech-illiterate, root access has fuck-all to do with that. Unless the OS is incentivizing average users to use root access enough that a sizable portion actually would (desktop Linux and nothing else), then a comparison of which OS gives easier root access couldn't be less relevant when talking about an entire generation of kids.
Here, Chrome OS is meaningfully much worse than OS X for teaching kids tech literacy on the grounds that the average user experience is dumbed down to hell. Meanwhile:
Literally where? I've done nothing but lambast Chrome OS this entire thread except to correctly point out that it has user-facing folders which you do often interact with. Apple? By correctly pointing out that the Apple desktop ecosystem is massively less dumbed-down than Chrome OS, I'm defending them? Dude, I use Linux and Android (the latter begrudgingly; locked bootloader) and would never purchase an Apple product again for the foreseeable future; next time, save your sweaty, mouth-foaming screed about Apple bad for when you actually find someone who likes and supports Apple.
You’re not wrong. This is just lemmy.
The original commenter compared ipados to chromeos, and they compared osx to windows, I never saw a comparison from osx to chromeos.
The point being made is that modern operating systems often times in the hands of kids (chromeos and ipados) are designed to abstract away much of the underlying elements of the os.
They absolutely compared OS X to Chrome OS by directly comparing what Apple did in the 90s and 00s to what Google did in the 10s. If you take the comment as its own isolated thing, sure; if you understand it as a response to another comment (which it is), then the comparison is smacking you in the face.
What planet am I on right now? Should this conversation be about media literacy instead of tech literacy?
It is rich that you are suggesting this should be about media literacy. How do you connect "what apple did on the 90s" and "what chrome OS did in the 00s" (which it was the 10s, not the 00s) as a direct comparison between operating systems? What the commenter is suggesting is that both google and apple had a hand in making students not prepared to interact with technology, not that they did it in the same way.
I don't even agree with that statement as I believe being exposed to macs at school (and likely windows at home) woild be beneficial to tech literacy. But you couldn't even comprehend enough to engage with the point. They were saying macos is not windows, and windows is what kids should be learning. Then you come in and yell and scream about mac being better than chrome.
You were down voted because you were wrong and an asshole
Because they're directly saying that Apple did with Macintosh what Google did with Chromebooks and that wasn't a problem for real-world tech literacy.
Except that they're using iMacs as a precedent that dumbed-down Chromebooks didn't (at least substantially) harm tech literacy. My interpretation is somehow a generous one, because the other interpretation is that they're comparing the iMac being complex but different from the industry standard to Chrome OS being dumbed down. These are two vastly different things.
I comprehended enough: either option is stupid as fuck – just one indicates a lack of evidence while the other indicates a lack of basic logic.
I'm wrong? Yeah, I originally said "00s and 10s" for Chrome OS because I thought it came out in 2008, but I looked it up and corrected myself yesterday(?) to just "10s" – completely incidental to the point of my comment. Did you notice too that OS X didn't exist in the 90s but I called it that anyway for simplicity? No? Oh, that's right: no one actually gives a shit.
Meanwhile, they're spouting provable and obvious misinformation about how Chrome OS doesn't have a user-facing folder system, so I think your explanation for why I was downvoted should leave out "I was wrong". Clearly the voters didn't give a shit about factual accuracy. I'm sure the other commenter used Chrome OS enough to judge it when they're saying that. Weird how you didn't address the part of my comment correcting transparent misinformation.
I was an asshole. And any mixture of "wrong" and "an asshole" gets blind upvotes on Lemmy all the time. No, what got me downvotes is that Lemmy doesn't have Reddit's hidden votes feature that stops a cascade of morons blindly downvoting anything that's at negative (I was at +2, -23 when I made my second edit; just acknowledging that blind, uncritical downvoting took that ratio from ~1:11 to ~1:3). And I'll continue being a condescending asshole until this Lemmy equivalent of boomers giving one star to businesses they've never been to – because Google asked them to rate their experience – is dead.
Have a nice day.
Based on this small exchange it seems like you erect straw men to knock down to inflate your intellectual self worth which is incredibly fragile based on how much you freaked out over a tiny correction that I didn't use at all in my argument.
If you are actually interested in engaging with the topic try harder to read what I have said
The 00s thing was the only demonstrably wrong part of my comment, and it was long-since corrected when you commented. So I asked why – when you argued that "being wrong" was a key component of the heavy downvotes – you took an aside for that yet conspicuously didn't mention how the comment with a 10:1 ratio spends half its length confidently spouting complete, easily disprovable bullshit about user-facing folder structures.
Seems more like a mix of anchoring bias, the bandwagon effect, and a disregard for critical thinking than it does factual accuracy, unless the tone policing component swamps everything else.
Yes, you were wrong that the original poster was suggesting that mac is the same as chrome is in its structure. They were instead saying macos contributed to poor tech skills just as chrome OS is now. and iPads also contribute to this as Chromebooks do now. They can both contribute to the same cause even if they do it in different ways. Nowhere did they ever come close to mention macos is just as garbage as chrome OS. You added that bit in yourself to strawman. Therefore being "demonstrably wrong"
And that was the entire substance of my discussion, how you were mistaken about the central point.
You are also wrong about the folder structure piece. While yes chromeos technically contains a folder structure and also allows for the user to interact with it. The whole damn operating system is designed around you not needing to do that, in nearly the exact same way phones are. There's a reason that college professors in computer science departments are so confused why their students don't know how to use folder structures, and I'd wager quite a lot that chromeos has a large part to play.
So there you go two demonstrable wrongs that have nothing to do with you missing a date
Probably not so much that you’re wrong as you just sound like a condescending dick.
No smarm this time: my question was 100% genuine. I actually don't know how you can use these operating systems and draw those conclusions. This feels like they ate someone else's half-baked opinions left out overnight, got food poisoning, and threw them up into this comment.
Also, in my opinion, being condescending is the correct response to people confidently spewing complete, easily disprovable bullshit. I confidently get things wrong sometimes too, but I'm getting really sick of this "I'm qualified to speak on everything" culture that social media is exacerbating.