I agree that we need more regulation in this area. It has been nice, though, that the market has seemed to show increasing interest in longer-lived products than it used to.
Unfortunately, there are still too many people and businesses focused myopically on short-term costs, but the existence of a market for long-lived products is important, because it proves that there is a viable alternative way of building stuff. It’s not just that phones, computers, TVs, etc. must just naturally fail after 3-5 years. That’s a design decision based on short-term rewards and incentives, and we can change the design of those products if we eliminate or balance against those incentives with ones that favor a more long-term outlook.
So, yeah: Joe Random Computerbuyer who just wants the biggest bang for his $300 at Wallyworld may never be the target market for a Framework laptop. But the existence of the Framework shows that there’s another way to build computers aside from what the Dells and various Chinese manufacturers churn out at the low end of the market. And that makes regulation viable, because regulators know that the alternative products exist. It’s just a matter of smacking some of the market players around a bit until they either become cheaper or the crappy alternatives (which tend to have externalized costs that everyone else has to pay) are removed.
Chromebooks are just budget-spec laptops. Hardware-wise, they ought to be fine for anything a K-12 student needs to do on a day-to-day basis (and for anything they can’t do on it, it’s probably a good teaching point for them to learn how to use a server or VM or cloud instance).
This is a business decision on Google’s part because they sold the machines at low or negative profit in order to build what they thought would be an ongoing revenue stream for them, which has not seemed to materialize.
OTOH, the real questions should not be aimed at Google, as much as it was local schools who signed the contracts with them without considering the e-waste and other downstream effects of what they were signing up for. That’s the sort of thing that I think needs to be factored into municipal and corporate purchasing: it’s all focused on the immediate spend, not on the long-term cost (and in the case especially of a municipality, that should be the cost to the community at large).
But hey… I bet a lot of them are going to turn up on eBay. As in the 90s when corporations were turning over hardware every 18-24 months, someone else’s poor decisionmaking can be a great subsidy for hobbyists. Not good for the planet, though.