alt Hacker News> So for example the underpowered cpu in the fw12 makes no sense to me until I found out that it's also designed for mass purchases by schools and designed to be flung around by angsty teens.
I think that might be overstating it a bit. Real "rugged" laptops do exist, and would be quite at home in that kind of use (well, usually you'd worry a lot more about how kids in primary school will treat your hardware than teenagers) but the Framework 12 is not one.
Real "rugged" laptops are far too expensive for schools to buy by the dozen. Also, while robust against the environment they're not so much against deliberate vandalism or theft. The target market for those seems to be construction/industrial and similar, and of course the military.
All school laptop fleets I've seen are simply the cheapest thing they can buy in bulk, when it breaks provision a new one.