Technology

When I was in 9th grade it was netbooks with Windows 7 and they were also terrible and fated for the recycling bin before I was a junior.

In most enterprise IT your lifespan for hardware is between 5 and 7 years maybe 10 for printers and network switches.

I'm sure most schools try to stretch hardware as far as it will go but IT would have known when they bought the Chromebooks that they'd not be long for this world as cheap as they were and that's the price they would pay for paying such a low price.

I think what is sticking up the works is on an administrative level, higher ups are expecting IT departments to stretch EOL dates like they used to do with Windows machines but now they absolutely can't and Admin didn't plan to have to buy all new whether or not IT did

My 15 years old Linux laptop can still do everything (except gaming new titles)

I agree that this is very bad on google's part of course, however I don't think the schools should just lie down and take it. As others have said, installing their own OS should be the way to go. It doesn't need to be 1 person manually installing the OS on each laptop, there are Infrastructure automation tool like Ansible that can, once set up, manage installation and configuration of an arbitrary number of devices. All the device needs to do is launch a web browser from what I understand, and pretty much every linux distro should be able to do that. If they choose one with a friendly DE, then it makes it easier to use for the kids. The devices will most likely run much better on an OS without bloatware too.