That said, I quickly upgraded to a 4 year used Thinkpad and that was a huge difference.
Are there even any x86 Chromebooks left at that price point? They are only one that are still capable of chrooting into Linux. ARM Chromebooks remain locked up.
I don't know if this is particularly current or what, or if it's easy to setup to run another OS or whatever, but it meets your price and architecture criteria.
https://www.bestbuy.com/product/hp-14-chromebook-intel-celer...
It was a Sony Vaio, and the only thing I really remember about the hardware/specs is that it had a physical scroll widget under the touchpad on the edge of the case. Software-wise, it was running some relatively locked down version of Windows. I installed Arch on it and used it to rebuild and manage the non-profit's website.
The other thing that I remember from it is that it was my entrance into using the terminal as my primary interface - the first place I used Vim regularly, and the first time I'd installed tmux. One day I was trying to test a dropdown or something on their website, and discovered that my touchpad didn't work. It turned out to have been broken by an Arch update, which wasn't terribly surprising. What was surprising is that once I'd traced down the issue and corrected it, I realized that it had been broken for almost two weeks. I'd used that computer every day and hadn't needed to use a mouse even once.
That's basically the reason I learned Linux initially, and those hours debugging video driver issues would serve me well later on.
The school thing is different, but also hardly unique. A school issued macbook is often similarly locked down and unusable as a dev machine, due to the student lacking permissions to install anything the school deems dangerous.
It was junk. The EeePC was cheaper, lasted much longer and had Debian out of the box.
If I got a Chromebook as a personal machine as a kid, I probably would’ve rooted it and see what I could do, but growing up, the beauty of the Mac (in that Snow Leopard era) was progressive disclosure. I could start on the happy path and have a perfectly stable machine, then customize the behaviors through the terminal, see what it does, mess with the system files, see what breaks, revert it, then go back to using iMovie like normal.
In my (admittedly limited) time using a rooted Chromebook, it’s much more like a switch flip. You go from mandatory water wings directly into getting pushed into the ocean and Google shouting “Good luck!!”
If the school is managing these Macs, including laptops sent home with a student, then unless it's for a specific purpose they aren't allowing you modify files, you probably aren't allowed to open a terminal or system settings, and you definitely aren't disabling SIP. You might not even be able to access the open internet if they've hard-configured it into a VPN. No different from a managed Chromebook.
Likewise, even older and lower-end unmanaged Chromebooks can enable a full Linux environment that runs a terminal in a browser tab. Doing so doesn't require root or developer mode, and it doesn't change or sacrifice any of the rest of the ChromeOS environment (for which your core assertion, that an unmanaged Mac is a computer and an unmanaged Chromebook is a thin-client appliance, still fundamentally holds). You can install Blender and have it running in a window by about 1 minute into watching a YouTube video titled "How To Download Or Update ANY VERSION Of Blender On Chromebook".
Gaining root on a Chromebook is mostly just a prerequisite to modifying things specific to ChromeOS, but the easier to access, more featureful, and safer LDE is still an entire operating system that you can tinker with, screw up, overload, blow up, and reset to zero, all without losing the happy path of opening up Canva (or, more likely, CapCut on their phone/iPad) and editing videos or whatever.
The Macbook Neo will be no different if the school is actually managing them properly.
So this is only for the kids who are obsessed not just with computers, but brand-new computers. Which is a different demographic.
My 12-year-old wanted a laptop to build mods for games. I got her a new M1 Macbook 8GB - $425 from Walmart, refurbished.
My 17-year-old wanted a laptop for college, but wasn't sure what she needed or wanted yet. I gave her my 2020 M1 MBP.
If either of those situations arose today, I'd get them a Neo.
Uh... if you need to compile for iOS, sure.
But outside of that, no its not.
You are literally just paying the Apple tax that they deliberately choose.
It's still the best desktop UNIX experience, especially since cheap PC laptops (and until very recently expensive ones) almost always have horrible build quality. It's also within only the last few years that PC trackpads came anywhere near the trackpads on Apple machines. Sometimes what you call a "tax" is literally some of us wanting quality.
Fedora is the best OS humanity has ever made. No exaguration. There needs to be the best, and its Fedora.
Linux gets a bad reputation because 20-ish years ago Ubuntu sent out free CDs and became the dominant OS. Ubuntu/Mint is part of Debian family, outdated linux. They call outdated Linux 'stable', but its not stable like a table. Its software version frozen. Bugs that are fixed today wont get those fixes for 2 years. Not to mention, a new mouse you buy from amazon/nvidia card/web video player wont work due to the outdated nature of these distros. (And yes, I know you can do surgery to update it, but no one likes that)
Fedora is not Arch. Fedora is the consumer grade Red Hat.
I've been an Ubuntu user for 20 years, and RedHat and Suse prior to that. Ubuntu just worked. Debian had packages for everything, including from 3rd party vendors. It lets me focus on my work, and not worry about the OS, or compiling packages, or finding installers. When I had issues (rare), the large user base meant that someone had already figured out a solution to the problem.
The flavor of Linux doesn't matter so much in my opinion.
Ubuntu, Mint, PopOS, and others with Debian as an upstream are not Debian. They build their own packages on their own schedules.
Fedora is not “consumer grade RedHat”. It’s the rolling release upstream of RHEL, much like Debian Testing is upstream of Debian Stable.
The main reason Linux got a bad reputation was the tribalism of people going off half-cocked talking about their personal preferences without actually working with the alternatives and starting this sort of holy war diatribe.
i have never once successfully installed fedora. probably just hardware stuff, but as often as i've wanted to try it and opensuse, they have never booted post-install for me. on machines i've successfully installed Debian and openBSD. go figure. i know i'm an outlier here. maybe it's just bad luck.
but reading your post, it sounds like a club i don't want to be a part of. linux is linux. distros don't matter. you can get nearly anything to work if you spend enough time on it. GUI OS installers that fail are not worth my time.
And, yes, I have an overlaid Linux-Libre kernel in SilverBlue.
How about Qubes OS? Also the parent never said anything about isolation and roll-backs. Nobody mentioned Silverblue except you. The discussion is about ordinary users, not hackers.
But honestly I did not like Silverblue. I had a 13 year old gaming computer I installed it on and I couldnt get the ancient GPU drivers installed due to the way things are containerized. This would have been a few commands otherwise.
Maybe its fine for chromebook-like things. I might have picked a bad testcase.
And when I go to the grocery store, I am paying the Safeway tax that they deliberately choose, and when I go to the gas station I am paying the Exxon tax that they deliberately choose, and so on.