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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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I'd argue the iPad is the bigger offender personally. They're blaming Chromebooks because that's often what schools provided, but the same exact timing existed before with iMacs in classrooms all through the 90s and early 00s for millennials despite Windows being by far the more common real world OS they would need to know in the workplace.
But when it comes to portable devices the iPhone and iPad are king, that's what young people want and often what they're given. And those operate nearly exactly the same as a Chromebook. Toss everything into a cloud bucket, no user-facing folder structures to learn, everything locked down with limited access and customization. A take it or leave it approach to user interaction.
I have user-facing folder structures on every iOS device I own. What exactly is the extent of your personal experience using iOS?
My experience with iOS devices is mostly non-jailbroken devices, where the file system is not accessible.
What is it you think the Files app is showing you?
Not trying to be rude but the files app is absolutely not giving you anything close to full access to your devices file system. It's an abstraction over the actual file system if anything.
A very limited scope of the filesystem instead of exposing the whole thing. Android does the same thing, and so does every system that doesn't allow the user to have root access.
Ohh…the files are in the computer
Yeah there's a lot more visible just by connecting via USB but it's still not good.
Thats already more effort than most people will put forth
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.
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
You’re not wrong. This is just lemmy.
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.