Google to rent notebooks to schools for $20/mo each
 

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-20061896-266.html
$20 per month, including hardware upgrades, warranty, and admin support? That could potentially put a cramp in Microsoft's style of hooking kids early into believing that all computers are Windows.

It sounds like a good deal on the surface, but you can BUY netbooks for $300 or less these days. That's barely over a year's worth of use.

Doesn't include software upgrades and IT support though. IDK how much schools spends on all that a month p/student but I'm sure Google did their research before setting a pricepoint.

I think where it starts to make sense is not having to have IT staff to support them and the warranty. Having run help desks (a long, long time ago) I can tell you the expense isn't really in the hardware. It's supporting what some idiot has done with their software. If Google is serious about handling that well they could make some inroads there.

I can see that to a point, but it's still not like there will be not IT staff requirement to set them up and that type of thing. I guess we'll see - I'm just surprised that it wasn't a better deal from what I would expect.

I actually got one of the CR-48's they sent out several months back. The closest thing to admin work I've had to do was type in my wireless passphrase. The machine updates itself.

I agree with what you're saying. However, I would never buy a netbook. We brought one in at work for evaluation a while back, and it was a pretty slow machine right out of the box.

Netbooks aren't right for every user, that's for sure. And netbooks running Windows are horribly slow. The Google ones run better since it's just a copy of Chrome running.

FWIW, looks like they're doing the same thing with Enterprise systems for $28/month.

As I've read more about this, it really seems like an interesting approach if a business can make it work. It'd be tough for a lot of businesses, but if your computing needs are reasonably basic, you could go the Chromebook route and not have to deal with a central server at all - email, file storage, and antivirus would all simply be in the cloud. That's tempting.