A couple personal anecdotes related to this: I volunteer at a school to help maintain around 300 iPads and ~20 iMacs. It's awful. (I am a longtime Mac user at home BTW). The management tools around updating the iPads, installing apps, and configuring users are all terrible, unreliable and old. It leads to teacher frustration and less use of the equipment in the classroom. The only thing worse are the windows computers, which are in such bad shape that they just stopped using them.
An example: To install an app for all students on the iPads, we need to plug them all in to a big USB hub, then connect a Mac with management software to it and run a sync procedure. It fails on about 10% of the devices, so we run it again. Each run takes several minutes. There are over-the-air methods for doing this, but they're corporate solutions not provided by Apple and are pretty expensive.
So given all that, if ChromeBooks promise per-user customization and document storage with much simpler administration, it's no wonder they're taking over.
My personal experiences is exactly the same. In 2012 my old high school rolled out whatever the Google Apps for Education equivalent program was. They auto-generated usernames and passwords based off first and last name. Not only did this lead to a large number of students and teachers getting """hacked""" but most students ended up triggering the rate limit for incorrect passwords and the teachers eventually gave up on it. 5 years later they seem to be doing better but never underestimate the number of hurdles rolling out tech into an education environment. You either sync 1:1 with AD or convert water into wine, otherwise you are not getting adopted probably.
This is why I have always wanted schools to start using Linux.
When I use Windows or OS X, and I want a program to do a thing, I have to sift for hours through half-baked $20 tools that claim to do that thing until I find the free one that does it well. In Debian/Ubuntu/Nix/etc., there's a package for that.
The goal is to maintain these systems. The least maintainable operating systems I have ever used are Windows and OS X. To contrast: the most maintainable operating systems I have ever used are NixOS, Android, Archlinux, and Ubuntu (in that order).
Story Time:
When I was in high school, all the computers were running Windows (XP to 7 depending on the date) and Deep Freeze. Deep Freeze is a "commercial solution" that runs windows like a Live CD (All filesystem writes go to a tmpfs that disappears at reboot). Every time we went to the "computer lab", we would have to wait ~10min. (not kidding here) for windows to boot. If we wanted persistent storage (to save homework), we would need to use our own (USB storage, email, etc.) I, and a few of my friends, learned the password to disable Deep Freeze, so we could have persistent storage, and secretly abused it. "C:\persis.sys\[Starcraft, Warcraft, OpenLieroX, HaloCE, etc.]" stuck around for a few years after my graduation.
The geek that I was, I eventually moved up to carrying around a flash drive with tinycore, and a floppy to boot it (those systems just predated USB boot). When we went to the computer lab, I popped in my floppy and flash drive, and within a minute had Linux running on a ramdisk, and Chrome at my fingertips. At least 5min. passed before anyone else could log in to Windows.
End Story Time
Windows has gotten much more maintainable, and usable, but still hasn't even approached what Ubuntu was more than 10 years ago. The fact that Microsoft software is the status quo sickens me. We have failed our communities by letting that perpetuate. We have wasted thousands upon thousands of tax dollars on this issue when free software has been readily available, and far superior. There is no excuse.
>The only thing worse are the windows computers, which are in such bad shape that they just stopped using them.
Sounds like they are old and haven't been maintained properly.
I have experience with small (~200) and large (~6,000) professionally maintained Windows installations. They operate like a finely tuned engine, allowing you to focus on your core work.
And that's the key. There are hacks who call themselves "IT" and there are true IT folks who have the training and knowledge to do things right the first time around.
Prior to my first experience with professionally managed Windows installations I had completely ignored that entire world. We built our own computers --save laptops-- and every installation, save the initial image, was locally managed by the engineer running that machine. Works great. No question about it.
From experience with 20~30 machine installations, I can't remember a single serious issue in, say, 20+ years other than a hard drive failure. No real hardware failures outside of that. No viruses or any such problems in, again, 20+ years and multiple generations of OS and hardware. The key, I'll guess, is to buy good hardware and install good software.
And so, when I read accounts that describe nightmares I have to wonder what people might be doing. I don't understand it at all. I've been using PC's since the very original IBM PC and I can't remember a nightmare scenario, ever.
As for Mac's and iPads. I've had experience with ~200 seat Mac installations. They have the same issues PC's might have. The only "nightmare" I could point out is that, generally speaking, Mac users are utterly clueless. This excludes developers, of course. I saw IT burn time with the dumbest issues, whereas the PC users in the same business (about 200 as well) really only consumed IT time when there were hardware or software installation issues for the most part.
iPad's? I consider them to be useless for but a narrow set of business or educational applications. Cash register? Sure. Authoring documents and doing heavy web work? Nope. In general terms I am pretty down on tablets. I think they've manage to ruin desktop software. The transition of something like Skype from a computer-class application to mobile-first turned the program into a circus act that uses 10x more screen space for everything. Touch, as far as I am concerned, for business and other applications, is bullshit.
Chromebook is a far better choice, one that is easy to manage and deploy.
> Sounds like they are old and haven't been maintained properly.
That is the heart of the issue. Maintenance should not be so difficult. It has generally been a non-issue for most Linux distros for over a decade. Windows maintenance is difficult on purpose. There is an entire economy based on windows maintenance. It's not just a headache, it's like shooting yourself in the foot.
> There are hacks who call themselves "IT" and there are true IT folks who have the training and knowledge to do things right the first time around.
Since we are talking about public schools, I accept the reality that there will, more often than not, be a "hack" employed. Even so, their job should be that easy. The reason that it is not is that Windows promotes a culture of "hacks" and misinformation. GNU/Linux has the opposite culture, and it's free.
And in my case, there are no IT employees at all. For some reason there is budget available to buy the hardware and none to maintain it. This is changing slowly but for the moment it's the unfortunate reality. So it's up to teachers and volunteers to try and make things work, and as you were saying if things are too difficult they just stop using them.
And a side note, I was a Windows user for a decade and have now been a Mac user for a decade and the level of maintenance required for a Mac is _easily_ an order of magnitude less than Windows.
> I was a Windows user for a decade and have now been a Mac user for a decade and the level of maintenance required for a Mac is _easily_ an order of magnitude less than Windows.
That's still generally the case, but it's worth mentioning that over the last decade, Windows has improved significantly. It's still the worst OS, but it's a lot closer to OS X now.
After decades of innovation, we now have operating systems like NixOS and Guix that are inherently maintainable in ways Windows and OS X can only dream of. If we had a user-friendly NixOS (or Guix) for schools, etc. it would be trivial, even for teachers and volunteers, to maintain hundreds, or even thousands of systems.
An example: To install an app for all students on the iPads, we need to plug them all in to a big USB hub, then connect a Mac with management software to it and run a sync procedure. It fails on about 10% of the devices, so we run it again. Each run takes several minutes. There are over-the-air methods for doing this, but they're corporate solutions not provided by Apple and are pretty expensive.
So given all that, if ChromeBooks promise per-user customization and document storage with much simpler administration, it's no wonder they're taking over.