It is interesting to follow this discussion. I think it was in .uy where they said that while the laptops cost $200, TCO was ~$600, i.e. a bulk of the money was spent on infrastructure, teacher training, community, repairs etc. - so if you plan to do this *properly* then the upfront cost of the tablet is not *that* big of a factor, considering other expenses involved. However, it is very enticing to someone just starting out with new deployment to think in terms of upfront hardware costs - hence this thread.
I am personally against promoting tablets for education, but that matters little when a school administrator or teacher asks for them - you just make your case but do as they say :-) Lastly, I see huge value in used laptops. A thinkpad (T400) machine with 250GB HDD, 2GB RAM, a dual core processor and a 14 inch screen is available for <$130. I recently set up a small number of them running Linux Mint (because it is very cough-window-cough like) and a full offline mirror of ubuntu and mint repositories - which provides some ~80,000 software packages. These laptops are also easily repairable, and hence help promote repair culture. Cheers, Anish On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 3:12 AM, Alan Claver <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Nov 11, 2015, at 3:07 PM, Braddock Gaskill <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > > I would be very weary of relying on the root'ing of an Amazon Tablet. > They have been rootable in the past, then automatic upgrades break the > rootability, then someone figures out a clever hack, and then it is > defeated again by Amazon. You are not going to know month-to-month if you > can buy more to deploy. > > Does a “hardened” device still have value in the communities we service. I > think that’s an important question that needs discussion. No consumer > device is going to meet the definition of hardened (or repairable). > _______________________________________________ > support-gang mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/support-gang >
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