I'm afraid they meant the author's name is "Thomas AIslop" (because global annual shipments of laptops are dozens of millions)
@MiaWinter@nina_kali_nina you are meaning to tell me that not 1/4 humans in existence bought one of those?
I am shocked
@MiaWinter I think it's the exposure bias. I like to call it the Game of Thrones effect. In the West it feels like everyone has seen it, or at least heard about it. Yet its most popular season 8 had merely 44 million viewers worldwide during the streaming, and about 10 million Blu-ray and DVDs sold afterwards.
@nina_kali_nina I love the way that the second- and third-placed companies in that list both shipped more than the first-placed company.
Bonus points for the grocer's apostrophe.
are these the desposable kind that you use once and throw away?
@kim unfortunately yes :( I've got a couple of them dirt cheap; they are Linux laptops that are good enough for YouTube and spreadsheets, yet they are often locked by the admin who didn't care to unlock them, so unless you can unsolder the bootloader chip and reflash it, it's mostly rubbish
given the specs of the machine, is it worth doing?
@kim depends, I guess? If your budget is $50 and you need a laptop that can do everything a 15 year old computer can, and has a decent battery life, then maybe yes. It still can handle modern web, though one or two tabs at a time.
I am not sure where you are, but what is the new price of one of those?
If you could do some surface mount (un)soldering, and fiddling with the eeprom/flash, then that makes a useful machine for someone.
raw cpu is not as useful as a machine with a decent keygboard, that runs for 6+ hours these days.
is there a makerspace or hackerspace near you where folks do that or can help you learn to do that?
which reminds me, wonder what is in my local maker space...
@kim I mean, I can do that alright, my partner and I had done it to a couple of Chromebooks we have. But there's very little use for a Chromebook in a house with 4 MacBooks, two near-industrial-grade servers, and about 200 other computers
@nina_kali_nina @kim
I wonder how performance compares to say a Pi.
Get in Hackaday for putting a Pi in a Chromebook case, get in again for using a Chromebook mainboard to run Kubernetes.
@FritzAdalis @kim Acer 311 is based on Celeron N4000 (geekbench: 323 single core, 528 double core). Pi 4 has geekbench of 297 for single core and 683 for all four cores. Celeron has hardware accelerated video encoding. So, there will be very little performance gain if any. You can also boot into Windows on x86 Chromebooks...
@nina_kali_nina @kim
I didn't mean to imply it made any sense to do so... which can be the best kind of project.
@nina_kali_nina funny, i was just reading a statista summary on e-book sales (i was looking for e-book sales broken down by format), and thought it looked AI generated.
Given that their business model is to sell a Pig-in-a-Poke (you literally cannot see what you are buying until you have bought it), way to destroy their own reputation.
@zimpenfish this feels like such a humane mistake, but I honestly have no idea. Maybe it was autotranslated...
@nina_kali_nina The "According to one Redditor..." is silent 
@m and they sell this data!
@nina_kali_nina
100 laptops per child! Bright future ahead!