Let’s get one thing clear: Chromebooks are a pain. Sure, as soon as everyone got them we were all fawning over the technology and how it has this cool “state of the art” touch screen, but soon after, everyone began to hate them and with good reason. I’ve noticed now that everyone has turned to begrudgingly accepting them, but they’re still terrible.  

And for the sake of everyone’s sanity, I’m not even going to talk about the cases because I could write another entire story on that.

First off, the whole touch screen feature isn’t something to get hyped about. I’ve had my personal laptop with a touch screen and you quickly learn that it comes in handy, but its not a big deal.

Then we have the problem of the delete button. There’s a problem here simply because there isn’t one. Even just writing this down, I have pressed the lock button at least 20 times because that’s where the delete button is on my own computer.

The delete button is just so easy to use because its just taking out that extra step if you only have a backspace. For those that don’t know what the delete button does, it’s just like the backspace but it goes in the other direction.

And has anyone actually looked up the word “term” recently? Because that’s blocked, but somehow “vape” isn’t. So if you want to look up the closest vape shop then go ahead, but good luck looking up those literary terms for English class.

I know Fayette County is working on giving high school students more search freedom than the second graders, since currently we are all under the same restrictions, but I’m not sure it would improve anything very much. There needs to have a lot of change in the restrictions because obviously students who are legal adults need to have more access than seven year-olds.

Now even if the rest of the problems with the Chromebooks were manageable, the lack of personalization just ruins the whole thing for me. My whole philosophy on having any kind of new technology whether it be a phone, laptop, or software is to know everything I can about its features and settings.

Anytime I get a new piece of technology I sit down with it for an hour or so and go through every nook and cranny of the settings and personalization features so that I know the tech is going to work the best it can for me.

When I went through the Chromebooks, however, it took me less than five minutes. There’s barely any personalization other than what background you want to have. Sure, there’s a lot you can do with Google to customize the settings, but almost all software and programs on the Chromebook itself are blocked by the county.

I get that the Chromebook isn’t supposed to be used for much, but it really feels like we were just handed a keyboard with Wi-fi and Google Drive. There’s not much we can really use it for because its been stripped down to the bare essentials so that it “doesn’t distract us,” but other than that, it’s pretty useless.