When Should You Buy Your Kid A Laptop?

GuitarNeophyte writes "Marketwatch News reports that some people say that we should be buying our kids laptop computers well before they get into the higher education realm. Even as early as middle school. From the article: 'These days, it's almost unquestioned that college-bound students will tote laptops back to school. For parents of high school and middle school kids, the decision to invest in a laptop is far from given.'"

Re:Bully

[GPLDAN]

Other kids retaliate by stealing the bully's identity and linking him to Islamic radical websites.

Welcome to the new future.

ASAP!

[Ingolfke]

Buy your kid a laptop as soon as possible so they'll get out of the house and download all of their illegal music, movies, and software off of someone else's access point (not to mention all of l33t spl01ts they'll be using).

In the future youth street gangs will stand on the street corners with laptops leeching unprotected wi-fi.

Re:My kid is heir to my Powerbook 12".

[Knome_fan]

Could you adopt me?

Re:Oh please

[Stormwatch]

: I don't think ANY child should be given free
: acess to a spellchecker until he or she can read
: and write at a college level. It's meant to
: allievate your work, not do it for you.

Ahem [reference.com].

Back in my day....

[slapout]

...we couldn't afford them fancy "laptop" computers. We had big bulky gray boxes that sat on your desk. And we used a modem to dial-up a BBS. And we liked it. We loved it. We didn't have no fancy "high speed wireless internet". If we wanted to know something, we looked it up in a book! And we didn't have no fancy "instant messenger". If we wanted to talk to someone, we called them on the phone!! And we liked it. We loved it! ...young whipper snappers......

Re:Worked for me

[Anonymous Coward]

What, was their solitaire constantly interrupting the teacher?

Re:Worked for me

[BaudKarma]

13 months is way too late if you want your child to have a solid grounding in computers. I got one of those motion activated mice and ducttaped it to my kids hand at about 2 weeks of age. Mounted a 17" LCD on a bracket over his crib so that he could see the screen. The little guy has amazed me with how much he's learned already.

Re:Welcome to hypeland

[Anonymous Coward]

I went to a pretty posche high-school.

You can tell. It's spelt 'posh', by the way.

Re:keep their monitor in view

[Anonymous Coward]

Set up your offspring's computer(s) in your own home office.

Sure, if you want all your papers to be stuck together.

Don't have kids yet, but...

[coolGuyZak]

But when I do, I'm gonna go crazy with them. I'm talking reading them Insightful and Interesting Slashdot posts in the womb. Bedtime stories will consist of Linux HOWTOs and Unix manpages. Around the age of 5 or 6, I'll get little CoolGuyBob his first laptop, and a Gentoo live disk. By the time it's finished compiling, he'll have graduated high school. Problem solved!

Re:keep their monitor in view

[RobotRunAmok]

Until you trust your kids to browse the internet and use their computer responsibly, give them a desktop and orient its monitor so that it can be seen by you when you casually walk by

Funny. I give my clients this same advice, except substitute "Marketing Department" for "kids."

Correct Answer

[Ingolfke]

When Should You Buy Your Kid A Laptop?

Tuesday, April 10th 2007 between the hours of 9 AM and 11 AM local time.

Re:Worked for me

[The Clash Man]

Solitaire? Haha, my friend plays WOW in class. At least it gave me something to do, watch him rather than pay attention.

Re:Bully

[mrjb]

I understand you don't want to spoil your kids, so it's the desktop that should do the traveling. Like in the old days, when we had to drag our desktops uphill to school and back home through the blistering cold. Which is nothing compared to my father, who dragged around a PDP-11...

That's is a killer answer... :-)

[crovira]

You have a fabulous imagination. I would have liked to have you as a friend when I was in school.

I can just imagine pulling that stuff on some of the bullies I suffered under. (I was a small kid and high school was hell [even the girls used to pick on me] until I was sixteen when I grew a foot in a year and bulked up my frame with swimming and lifting weights. [I went from 'Lets pick on Chuck, he's so tiny', to being every mother's worst nightmare and every high school girl's wettest dream.] I live Grace Slick's comment "We have become the people our parent's warbed us about. :-)

Wiki?!?

[Mr. Underbridge]

Idunno, I certainly think having access to Wikipedia makes me smarter. The pace of learning is simply so much faster when you can follow one subject to another with a single click on a hyperlink than if I have to look it up in an index or in another book (which I might not even have).

No, it just makes you wrong about more things.

Re:Correct Answer

[(startx)]

Tuesday, April 10th 2007 between the hours of 9 AM and 11 AM local time.

Just about the time OSX 10.5 should be released, and it's even a Tuesday! Is that you Steve?

Re:Correct Answer

[whyde]

Wait... is that going to be Standard Time or the new Dimwit Savings Time?

Re:keep their monitor in view

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh god, this has totally inspired me to be a hacker dad when I grow up.

By day, I say "son, you need to shake the ethernet or your megahertz won't oscillate. I think that's what the IT guy at work said"

By night I secretly have a kernel-level keylogger and packet sniffer installed- all aggregated into convenient RSS feed and accessed on my Personalized Google page.

Son In Trouble RSS:

1. Talks about pornography at 10:48 over AIM

bwahahaha

Re:Worked for me

[hackstraw]

You can buy your kid a desktop computer during the middle school years, and upgrade it occassionally until the kid gets to high school or college and needs (or wants) a laptop or a faster gaming machine.

Or you could buy them a decent laptop (which coincidentally are either strongly recommended or possibly required by many colleges) their freshman year and be done with computers for the rest of their time in college.

I work with computers at a college, have been to college, so I guess I hear a thing or two about this stuff.

I can't think of something that on average would need to be upgraded besides possibly RAM on a school oriented computer. If your kid is into warez, music, movies, and needs an upgraded harddisk, buy them a multi-terabyte NAS device if you want.

I used my first computer, and Apple //c, from 1984 to 1994, and I did quite well in school. 1994 was my senior year in college and I "upgraded" to a 486 (and my grades plummeted, but thats an unrelated).

I'm not trying to say that an Apple //c or an 486 would be even near sufficient today, but your average student doesn't need much more than to surf the web, type papers, and whatever basic stuff they need. If a class requires more horsepower than your typical laptop or desktop machine, they will be provided with a system will do what they need. If the program that the kid is in requires XYZ for a computer, then that will be specified by the program.

I just don't understand why computers impair decisionmaking so much.

Wife: Honey, Johnny needs a cellphone for college so he can call us once a week to let us know how things are going.

SlashdotDad: I agree sweety. Why don't we save a couple of dollars and buy him one of those bigger, older phones, and every couple of years we can do something to improve it. We could buy a new battery that is smaller when the come out and shave the phone down to make it smaller like current phones! We could rewrite the javaOS, replace it with Linux, add an analog to digital converter and a cellular modem, and maybe buy them a PDA later so it could be used as a almost functional computer too. Lets see, ...

Wife: Why don't we just give him whatever basic phone comes with our plan and add him to the service?

SlashdotDad: Is it upgradeable?

Wife: Ours isn't, who gives a fuck, its a phone?

SlashdotDad: Is it upgradeable?

(pause)

Wife: Go buy him whatever phone and computer you want. Upgrade them weekly for all I care.

Re:Worked for me

[lgw]

An old favorite:

Eye halve a spelling chequer. It came with my pea sea.
It plainly marques four my revue miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word and weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write. It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid. It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite. Its rarely ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it. I am shore your pleased two no.
Its letter perfect in it's weight. My chequer tolled me sew.

Sauce Unknown

(Reader's Digest.)

Re:Worked for me

[clintonogamy]

Bad handwriting is a sign of lazyness

Not taking the time to look up and learn proper spellings is more a sign of laziness than poor handwriting, IMHO.

Re:Worked for me

[Anonymous Coward]

Did your school have a spelling class?

Re:Worked for me

[Dun Malg]

Bad handwriting is a sign of lazyness.

Bad spelling is more a sign of laziness than bad handwriting is.

the idea is no good

[jeffc128ca]

This is one of those "think of the kids - what a benefit" ideas that in practice will have zero or negative effect on kids.

As earlier posters have stated the kids won't be doing educational things on the laptops for starters.

What also flies in the face of reality is a large chunk of parents can not afford this. Laptops will become the new status symbol. Who's got the fancy expensive model, as apposed to the on sale this week model. Or worse yet, the government assigned "my family is on welfare" donation laptop model. What kids wants to carry that around. Its the high school social pecking order on steriods.

Nice thought but how about putting money in the actual schools, more specifically the ones in poor neighborhoods that don't even have books.

As a highschool student with a PowerBook...

[Mechcozmo]

My PowerBook has helped me with my schoolwork. I take notes in Word or TextEdit, draw diagrams in OmniGraffle, etc. I have done quite a bit of amazing work off of this machine, including exploring our school's computer network.

Also a great feature is that my PowerBook is always asleep. I can use my laptop more often if I don't have to wait for it to come out of hibernation, etc. Plus the fact that I don't worry about spyware or viruses while some of the other kids in my class bring their laptop to school and then can't use it because it is so messed up with malware.

I also do video work with Final Cut Express and it really makes a difference when the teacher asks for a video project. No "edited in the camera" crap but professionally done video work.

So while this is a bit of a plug for Apple, the iBook and the PowerBook make great companions for 10th grade and up students. I wouldn't recommend any laptop for below 10th grade... it just isn't needed. Even in highschool it isn't always needed. But if you have the right tools then the computer works for you, not against you.
And the fewer games available for OS X are a bit of a plus in terms of distraction. :-)