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As a tax paying Marylander I believe this is a reasonable economic choice for the state.

Especially Baltimore City which is receiving ~20k of these. The city does ongoing incremental social damage control, this is a part of it. The bottom 15% of people detract from the economy so thinking about it as service cost reduction rather than netting from it. The allocation rate for Baltimore City is something like 3.5% (!) while the rest of the state is like 2% and under.

It is about getting another couple percent of the people on the internet. Some approximate thread of literacy and ability to type and click is huge. The laptop modality is important to have over touch keys only.

There are many who don't have the wherewithal to get themselves online but it's a life changer for them to just have the basics.

As for vendor, Google is the lesser evil than alternatives by a wide margin. Top concerns are AdWords tricking poor into buying junk which is a part of the greater plan anyways; cyclical chronic marginalization with a slight upward trajectory. Gmail account creation is sorta evil. But where else is their email going to live? Hard to imagine a solution other than adverts and gov. surveillance being the cost center recoup. Google is way good at warehouse scale computing for web services (internally, GCP sucks).

Even crazier is that Maryland is already a top state for personal compute [1].

1. https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/united-states/quick-facts/a...

edit: grammar