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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

My kids have now had both iPads and Chromebooks, and the Chromebooks were obvious winners in every single way. The teachers and kids both like them, they're clearly better for actual school work and learning, everything is just better. It's just a nice bonus that they're way cheaper.

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I think if I were in high school today, I would today feel exactly the same as I did in 7th grade about Apple products. John Dvorak wrote an article that Apple machines were basically Cuisinarts and I thought the class was to teach me about computers. Everything was a captive garden and in 20-some years, all that has changed is that the garden is pretty.

At least with a Chromebook, there is a gate that you can open if you want. The Crouton project allows anyone to install a full OS. The best part is that if it gets broken, there is no danger or punishment. Just reset and everything is back to default and your files come back. Get good at it and then it is probably time for a real computer...

My kids have both iPads and school issued Chromebooks. They hate the chromebooks, only using them for homework. They call them "CrummyBooks." The build quality is terrible, battery life is terrible, and to my kids, they're locked down way too much (some of this might simply be the wifi restrictions/filtering at school).

Initially our school district planned iPads, but backtracked over cost. We were initially excited for them, so that our kids wouldn't have to carry so many heavy textbooks. But the quality of the textbooks on the Chromebook are terrible. It's as if the publishers simply took galley proofs and dumped them into a pdf.

> the quality of the textbooks on the Chromebook are terrible

Would you expect the textbooks to be better quality on the iPads vs on the Chromebooks? Why?

No, I just expected them to be better, more like an ebook than a crappy PDF. If I could move the textbooks to my daughter's iPad I would, but they're licensed and I haven't tried to work around the DRM.

Textbooks that cannot be read on a different device due to DRM? That's some really ugly distopian stuff. Feels so wrong on multiple levels.

Back when I was in school, I was getting some of the textbooks second hand from the year older students and selling mine to the younger ones, on a fair organized by the school.

Why can't you use the same texts on a laptop as on a tablet? Can't you buy the texts you were using on the iPad?

In portrait mode the iPad screen will match the page of a book more closely. With a screen wider than it is tall, you’ll either have the page really zoomed out to read, or only have half the page on screen and have to keep futzing with the scrolling.

The quality can vary immensely. The Chromebook that I have cost me less than 200$, has 10hr battery life and a fairly good display given its price.

That being said you have to understand what chromeOS is and isn't.

How much cheaper are Chromebooks? Education iPads are $300, to my naive self it doesn’t seem like there is a lot of room for a decent laptop to be much cheaper.

200-300 and probably less for bulk orders and contracts.

Some schools also avoid Apple and instead use recycled/repurposed computers that can run as a Linux or Windows thin client.

Edit: wording

Whats a computer?

But what about using them offline?

The local storage of a cheap Chromebook is comparable with what you get in a low end iPad e.g. 32 GB.

We looked at one for our son while we were backpacking. The advice I received was you can’t. Without a wireless connection it is totally useless.

In our case we were 3 weeks at sea with only email access.

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