I’m a bit annoyed.
Apple on Tuesday held an event in Chicago focused on its education customers. They offered a total solution that included an iPad and software to make learning in the classroom better for teachers and students, but somehow they are getting severely criticized for all of the announcements.
I’ve seen things written like, ‘Apple should have purchased a textbook company and given textbooks to all students for free,’ and the ‘new iPad isn’t cheap enough’, and the ‘iPad is missing many of the features of the Pro version.’
Let’s be clear, Apple couldn’t buy a textbook company and give them away even if they wanted to—the antitrust issues are too large. It’s a nice pipe dream, but it’s not based in reality. Criticizing Apple for that is just unfair.
In its 40 years of being in the education market, Apple has never been the cheapest product—they never will be. I don’t know why people expect Apple to all of a sudden just give away iPads to schools or even compete against a product like a cheap Chromebook on price.
Apple doesn’t make cheap products. Ever. They also don’t make shitty products. You can expect the iPad to last for years without breaking or becoming obsolete. I expect the return on investment for schools to be quite high when purchasing iPads for the classroom.
Comparing the entry level iPad that is designed for students and consumers to a pro model is just silly. The features we may need as pro users are not the same features students will need in the classroom. If Apple could sell the iPad Pro at that price, I’m sure they would, but it’s just not feasible.
What Apple did was look at the iPad and decide what features were needed by students in our schools and then make the product as affordable as possible. I think they delivered that product. Do students need True Tone for their display? No. How about front and rear cameras? That could come in handy, especially for AR or a field trip, and the iPad has that.
Does anyone really think the Chromebook is as feature rich and durable as an iPad? I don’t think so, but it is cheaper. That’s about all it’s got going for it.
I was never a fan of Web apps either, even when Apple introduced them with the original iPhone. There is no way Web apps are a better tool than native apps on the iPad and the App Store has 200,000 education apps available.
Apple screwed up a few years ago by not having the software and administration abilities on the iPad available for school districts. There is no question about that. But they have those features available now. Deployment of iPads is easier and teachers are able to interact with students using the technology.
I realize that school budgets are tight and every dollar counts. That’s a reality that we have to deal with everyday, but to think that Apple is going to compete with the Chromebook on price alone is delusional. Apple never competes on price in any market—they compete by having the best product and solutions available.
There are a few things we need to remember here.
Apple is not a charitable organization, they are a publicly traded company and have a responsibility to its shareholders. They have taken on markets like medicine and education to try and make them better in any way that they can. Do they plan to sell lots of products while doing that? Of course they do.
However, just because Apple has money in the bank, we can’t expect them to give away products to schools. Will every school district be able to afford Apple’s new education offerings? No, they won’t, but again this is not Apple’s fault.
We have societal issues in education that aren’t going to be fixed by Apple, and we shouldn’t expect one company to do it. Apple has a responsibility to offer schools the best products it can, at the best price it can. I believe they have done that.
The treatment Apple has been getting lately is the same one that people would give to one of their friends who wins the lottery.
“You’ve got money now, so I deserve some of it too”.
Isn’t that what they did with the new software features?
Apple’s announcement seems solid Jim, but you’re going way overboard here.
Maybe they’ve got the admin stuff right, but let’s reserve judgement until people actually start using it. This has traditionally not been an area of strength for Apple.
There’s also reason to wonder if this will hold their attention, or they’ll treat it like iBooks Author.
Prices are a mixed bag. The base price isn’t too bad. $100 for an extra 96GB of flash is pretty egregious, so hopefully 32GB is enough for most users. I doubt many schools will buy hundred dollar pencils. Maybe the crayon, but base ipad + crayon + generic case is ~$370. You can buy an awful lot of raspberry pi’s for that…
>but students and teachers want iPads, not chromebooks.
Students might want iPads because that are “Cool” but teachers I know LOVE the chrome books
Apple could do what Sun Microsystems did years ago (and no jokes about how they’re no longer with us). Make their products dirt cheap (at a loss) for the education market. Get those kids hooked on the technology and software infrastructure and you’ve built a customer for life. ROI isn’t something that should drive marketing to education.
That really doesn’t work.
Everybody in America grew up playing Oregon Trail on an Apple II, and then everyone went out and bought Windows machines.
This is not 1980
Thanks, I’ll just update the calendar on my Sun Microsystem machine over here.
Do more? No. When it comes down to capability in terms of software / hardware, the iPad / iPad Pro can do a lot more than a Chromebook. Chromebooks are great if all you want to do is use GSuite or Office Online but for truly creative tasks the iPad is designed for, not even close.
Sure, but schools use GSuite and chrome books. What apple offers is not enough, especially for the price. Hence why chrome books are in most public schools. The price did not change yesterday (do schools think a stylus is the answer?) Apple updated some tools that’s pretty much it.
In a classroom with Chromebooks, is there any option on a student-by-student basis to opt out of using Google services?
and I’ll update it on the schools chrome book over here
Apple doesn’t offer a total solution, that’s what the better criticism is saying. Google’s cloud storage, cloud apps, and management system are way better than Apple’s. The cost of iPads and Chromebooks to a school, with 3-year licenses for management, is nearly equivalent. But it’s a better experience in many, many ways to deploy and use Chromebooks. I’m saying this as a former teacher and dedicated Apple guy. Read Fraser Speirs’ twitter posts from the past week as a companion piece to Bradley Chambers’ 3/28 piece on iMore.
The devices aren’t the problem, it’s all the back end cloud services, and Apple isn’t even addressing the bigger issues. That’s why they’re losing education.
In K-5 keyboards are a disadvantage. Have you seen what kids can do to a Chromebook’s keyboard?
Thank you! That editorial about Apple needing to buy a textbook company was such BS, and so many comments applauded that for being so smart and realistic. I commented on that post saying it was actually the opposite, and got all these “But that’s what Google does.” Nonsense. When did google buy a major textbook company and then give away all of its previously free textbooks?
My iPad is my favorite device but when I look and my nieces and nephews… when they need to write they don’t want their iPads. They want their laptops. And the Google docs don’t work well with iPads anyway, they tell me.
I am so with you on this. Thank you!
To me, this was an insanely smart move from Apple. A lot of schools stopped buying iPads once they moved to laminated screens. It’s cost prohibitive to repair. Since this ePad isn’t laminated, schools may actually start to buy mass quantities again. Some schools moved to chromebooks, but students and teachers want iPads, not chromebooks. The only thing that disappointed me was the lack of a new iPad mini. They’re not trying to market the mini to education, but it should would be nice to have something that’s not crazy old as an option.
Google has great management tools for chrome books/google accounts. Chrome books are cheap. Most school districts now use google apps. Sure there are some amazing things you can do with a 299 iPad (+ keyboard cover, stylus) but for most districts its not enough to over come the price of the hardware and software integration google (including backend) has going for it.
More here: https://edu.google.com/latest-news/stories/?institution=K12&goal=Teaching%20%26%20Learning
I think apple is a little to late to the party, what they have to offer is not enough. Obviously google is hoping for future profits from having kids use these google tools. They are not making money now. On the chromebook/tablet side companies are probably making 10-15% profit (any hoping for future customers) It’s fine if apple does not want to follow them. But it does mean that the likeliness of schools switching to apple is very low. I know that apple is not a charity but they need to do better on price if they want to compete in the k-12 market.
Much of the criticism is valid though. This event seemed like a continuation of their strategy from the 2012 education event, which hardly made any impact to education at large.
The main points of concern I understand that make Apple’s strategy a deal breaker revolve around school’s IT depts. Chromebooks are simply easier to manage and deploy for an entire school system. It really doesn’t come down to cost, but practicality for workers that already have a hard enough job (as Apple pointed out in the event).
Apple seems focused to reinvent the learning process. And that’s admirable. But they need to have a little pragmatism in their strategy. They need to accept the reality that without making it simpler to actually deploy and manage iPads, their vision will never happen. That seems non-negotiable, regardless of price.
Nope. At least not at any of the 3 school districts that my kids have attended with them.
Exactly, you got it.
I doubt anyone critical of Apple’s announcement would say the Chromebook is a better tool generally than an iPad or a MacBook but in a school setting the combination of Google apps and Google’s classroom management apps and inexpensive dumb terminals (chromebooks) is a win.
Apple makes great tools for individuals and my guess is most kids in K12 who use Chromebooks will be using a MacBook in college, but in K12 where IT departments and districts make these choices on a large scale, and, importantly, the Chromebook solution has been working well for years, I doubt there’s going to be a huge sea change any time soon.
Frankly, I think Apple would have been better off releasing a sub-$1000 MacBook for this market: it could have more easily been folded into a classroom of Chromebooks running google apps and of course then, done more as applications outside of the google universe are run.
Some what. But the tools for chrome books are easier, better and can do more. Apple is not bring anything new to the table on this front and chrome books are cheaper (and have keyboards) so why switch?
You make a great point and maybe Apple should have aimed their iPad in ed event at very young kids who don’t write papers and have to deal with workflow. Unfortunately, it was aimed at K12 which includes kids writing papers and such.
Exactly. Follow through.
Those of us in the “Pro market” have some experience with that.
Maybe keyboards are a disadvantage for K-2, but I wouldn’t group 3-5 grades in that.
Or maybe some grade 3s but definitely not grade 4 and 5. (as a dad off a 4th grader with both a Chromebook and an iPad)
Brilliant comment. Every one of your points is spot on including your last paragraph which many should take very seriously.
The things you’re mentioning, I totally agree with. But I only rebutted that one point, and people said I was wrong because Google did that. I don’t think Apple has been brilliant with their iPad strategy. But the textbook thing was silly. Personally, I think they need to update the whole line in the Spring, and they need to add Phone.app to the 4G iPads
Wow Jim, your reaction is as misguided as the suggestion Apple buy up textbook companies and give the stuff away. There are very real issues with Apple’s education strategy and very real frustrations with them from the people who, you know, actually do this stuff for a living.
Apple promoted, loudly, that schools would save money moving to textbooks on iPads. In reality the net costs have been significantly higher.
Yeah, Apple is a premium product, and it’s fine for you and I to pay a premium, but that doesn’t play well in education with most things purchased with public funds and schools scrapping for every penny and slashing programs left and right. No, it’s not up to Apple to fix the funding issue, but this needs to be a serious consideration when designing and pricing a product for public schools.
Apple has given the least amount of attention to the area that comprises 90% of what large school systems need; management and deployment tools. They are woefully behind Google in this area, and it matters a great deal to the people who actually run these programs. They are not, despite what you’d gather from Apple’s presentation, typically handled by teachers.
Apple’s education push seems entirely built around the idea of small private schools with lots of funding. They have the resources in personnel and cash to do some of the things Apple promotes. That’s fine in and of itself, but they push this stuff to public school systems and in this area it’s not well thought out at all, and they deserve significant criticism.
Being a fan of Apple and their products doesn’t mean defending them at all times. Jim only seems to get riled up by Apple when he finds hip-hop on his Apple Music home page.
Thumbs up! Good article to clear this! Thank you ?
no notion that the mindless student is hooked for life is bunk. when i was a kid we used ancient apple II and IBM desktops. both are beyond dust now.
the point is when a 5 yo kid is 25 the computing landscape will be very differenent. what he used in school will likely be irrelevant. as always.
Thank you for posting this. I have been thinking the same thing all week while listening to podcasts and reading posts.
I recently attended an Apple education seminar explaining all of the software features. It was very impressive. However, when asked about iPad memory required, they said that minimum should 64 GB. What’s the base memory on the new iPads for school? Right. For our school, it’e a non-starter, as the majority of our iPads have only 16 GB
The point is that we’re not “still” in the Apple ecosystem. Some of us are in it again, but not “still”.
The vast majority of people went to Windows.
Giving away tens or hundreds of millions of dollars worth of computers just to try to hook kids as future customers isn’t a very good business strategy.
Writing a paper and turning it in is a simpler task with a Chromebook and Google apps than it is with an iPad, which, will need the addition of a keyboard and possibly a pencil to mimic text editing with a real keyboard and touchpad.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the iPad and I’m all over Macs and have been for a long, long time, but schools are a different animal and they don’t do feature comparisons, they want end to end simplicity and homogeneity.
Apple = Think Different
Schools = Think the same
More accurately: Schools = Work the same
Philosophically I’m with Apple but schools are a different animal, an institutional animal.
That wasn’t the entire article, it was one idea and not a major one. The main thing I got out of the piece was that Apple hasn’t provided an end to end solution with the iPad and the iWork apps. I personally think the Chromebook and Google app solution is less than wonderful but in fact, it works on many levels and has been working for many years now.
I took the textbook comments to mean that Apple has not done a great job of supporting teacher-made content with iBooks Author; they made a tool and then let it twist in the wind without an update for a long time as they’ve done with many tools.
In the early iPad days Apple showed pictures of kids with huge day packs of books and then showed an iPad and said that the iPad could hold all of those books but in fact, that’s never happened, most of the reasons totally out of Apple’s control. Still, it was a selling point and it didn’t come to pass.
Wow, a whole lot of support for the junk ecosystem based on Chrome. Really, the reason they have gone with Chrome is because they don’t have anything better up to this point.
Apple just gave them vastly better tools. I develop curriculum for our own school. And the tools Apple has created are going to be a game-changer once people wake up.
I don’t think you were wrong at all, I just didn’t see the book making and textbook part of the piece as his major thrust. Or, better said, it’s not what I focussed in on.
Read Kip’s comment below. It says what I meant to say a lot better than I said it.
it’s all nonsense… just another topic du jour for the usual clickbait pundits and haters to bag on Apple, as usual. everything they do is wrong, google is winning, yada yada.
it used to be IBM, then Microsoft, now Google. and yet….here apple is, the most successful public company in human history. must suck to be so wrong all the time, right!?
Guess you folks don’t realize we’re STILL in the Apple walled garden…these preferences persist!
You sorta prove my point 🙂
What are the stats on Chromebook durability and frequency of repair? How long is an average Chromebook’s expected life in typical student use? And how much downtime do they experience for physical problems?
A lot of people seem to be sold on Chromebooks as great tools for students, but what capabilities are Google apps enabling in schools? Word processing and presentations for the next generation of project managers and customer-service reps?
first of all you’re talking about storage, not memory.
second, who said what the “requirement” was? not apple. there is no requirement that these new education tools require 64gb of storage, which is double what the new budget ipad comes with (32).
nice creative fiction, keep it up.
Apple tells its customers what its thinks they need.
Apple should listen,
Number 1- cases trapped school districts need affordable solutions.
The majority of complaints seem to boil down to “but what about the poor schools?” Anyone who argues school budgets are tight is talking about public schools in mid to low income districts. And yes, we do need to invest more money in those areas, but that’s a problem for “we”, the public. That’s not specfically Apple’s problem. Apple is clearly targeting private schools, public schools in wealthy districts, magnet schools, et al, much they way they target high-income customers with all their products. The iPad competes against Chromebook in education the same way the iPhone competes against Android devices. Of course, most people don’t understand that competition either.
not to belabor the point but it wasn’t about giving away the stuff The point was to give dramatic discounts to build market share more widely across all of the educ market..not just the better-off private schools.
But maybe that is precisely what Apple wants to do since the better-off are the best customers for Apple.
Herein lies the crux of the problem.
For pundits, politicians, municipal administrators, etc., cost is the variable that trumps all other decisions. And every election cycle education is one of the top issues for constituents.
How, then, can you have improvement without spending money, without investing for the long-term, without starting kids off with a solution that is well researched and at the forefront of technology? We are doing our children a terrible disservice by limiting or eliminating these kinds of opportunities, yet it happens every day in every school in every city. And people cry at election time and vote for a ‘temp’ to administrate our children’s education. And teachers cry they are underpaid and strike against this inequity.
Wake up, take ownership of your child’s education and demand quality over quantity. Make smart investments in your children’s future instead of that trip to Cabo, or that extra jet ski. Don’t whine when they raise teacher’s salaries and you now pay more taxes, and don’t whine when your kid accidentally looses his Apple Pen. Education ought not be a Race To The Bottom scenario, but should be better than we had it, offering the best opportunities for the biggest impact.
Apple, obviously, envisions a future where the masses subscribe to their philosophy of success. So then, what stake do the pundits have in keeping our children’s education underfunded and mismanaged? I don’t know if Apple’s strategy will prevail, but I’m glad they will not compromise quality over quantity.
No, being a Customer Service Rep is a dying profession here in the United States, and once you find one you need a college degree to barely make a living wage. I was seasoned in customer service for a little over ten years and the industry has outsourced most call centers to Asia.
Then what sort of other jobs remain that a Chromebook can help prepare someone for? I mean, besides answering someone else’s email.
They enable a lot of personalization of a learners path. There are many excellent websites that allow for highly granular instruction. There are a lot of engaging web apps that give students opportunities to practice while I fine tune specific skills with groups of students. In 2nd grade I don’t have an iota of a problem with students being engaged enough using Chromebooks.
The point of technology in schools, it seems to me isn’t so much about teaching kids how to use technology. At least not in primary school, it’s just a good tool for traditional 3 Rs type content iOS and Chrome equally so.
iPads may enable that kind of stuff too, but engagement just isn’t something I have much trouble with in primary school. I do have lots of problems that Apple didn’t really do anything about for instance the overwhelming number of logins kids need and for a variety of reasons password managers aren’t terribly well suited to schools. It seemed to me Apple was playing catchup in most regards and not really advancing the ball in any areas where most educators are really feeling a lot of pain in tech deployments.
Thanks for your answer. I suppose my overall impression of Chromebooks (never having used one) is that they use cheap hardware and Web apps as a training system for noncreative, clerical office work (while providing Google with unrestricted student data), whereas iOS ostensibly provides native-app support for a wider variety of genuinely creative capabilities. I’m happy to be corrected if that’s not accurate.
I Agree. Apple is more device based and therefore is more people who start from the nice device and then add on tools to manage them. The biggest fans are usually enamoured with the nice device, nice software on it and do not mind the fat-client storage. So you end up with devices that are managed by tech-savy teachers. Chromebooks were planned from the web-base and are therefore planned to be managed at scale by non-teachers with the file-management being done in the cloud.
With intensive iPad use the teachers will become the sysadmins with their classroom app etc. It feels more like the proud teacher riding the class’s ipads.
With intensive use of chromebooks the teachers can be non-tech-savvy teachers.
I do not think that is accurate.
Chroembooks are much better for creative writing than ipads. The point you miss about all the “creativity” of iPads is that it is touchscreen based graphics, video etc. which can help with maths and other subjects. I am not saying it is without merits, but I am saying that a couple of graphical capabilities do not make creativity. In fact they will tie you down to one specific hardware+software platform at a very high cost while not allowing much of the chromebooks advantages. With Chromebooks you can do interactve group projects on the basis of inquiry based learning where the sudents type, comment, co-author projects with which they engage intensely and learn a lot.
Of course, if you add a keyboard to an ipad and use collaborative writing tools like G suite you can do the same on iPads to achive the added value. Online collaboration is one of the 21st century skills usually mentioned. iPads are highly individualized creative apps, but compared to Chromebooks they are maybe better described as wankerware 🙂 . I hope I do not start a war with this way of phrasing it.
There have been several thrads asking users of schools with both MS-O365 and G-Suite if they had to dump one of them, which one would they keep. These threads are usually divisive on preference for individual applications, but they usually overwhelmingly end with “If I had to choose: G Suite for its collaboration”. Chromebooks truly allow switching devices and collaboration. iPads are graphically nice. But they cannot do most creative everyday things that chromebooks can. And if you use all the lovely video creation features on iPads you’ll end up with a mega file-management problem. I’d rather use WeVideo (or other services) on Chromebooks. As you can tell, I think web-services centric and not device centric and therefore favour chromebooks.
Won’t Google apps “tie you down to one specific hardware/software platform”? And how long does an average Chromebook last under heavy student use?
So, collaborative web apps, a keyboard, and cloud storage for video creation because you don’t like managing files. Got it.
“dramatic discounts” & “at a loss” = “Giving Away”
On the software side: Pure-play web applications will lock you in less than client-installed applications. I could switch between G Suite, Zoho and Only-Office quite easily.
Intensively used Chromebooks with keyboards last a couple of years. The upgrade cycle should be anywhere between 3 and 5-6 years.
Another way of phrasing it would be: I was originally asked if I would be interested in teaching with iPads (in the early years when their stand-alone/single user aspects cost a lot of hassle). Which I declined on the grounds that they had no serious back-end side. Later on I did go for Chromebooks because they do have a back-end. iPads were more for “enthusiasts” who wanted to do more tech admin because they like the gadgets.
“iPads were more for ‘enthusiasts’…”
That sounds familiar for some reason.
Is your personal upgrade cycle comparable to that of younger kids?
I think that most schools will have upgrade cycles for chromebooks of 3-4 years. Particularly paperless schools (where most not-taking and materials-reading will have been replaced) will see wear on keyboards etc. increase. The risk of damage wll also increase through sheer amount of use. I am not sure about my personal upgrade cycle. I use one laptop as a mediacentre after a couple of pre-teen guest-visitors destroyed the keyboard playing roblox. i.e usage-type still affects greatly how long devices last. I am not sure of the factors that influence device life. Parents owned vs district/school owned might give the impression that students take better care of their own devoces, but sceptics like me would like to see proof first.
Chromebook proponents will usually see a limited life-expectancy for a chromebook as a bonus (so you do not get stuck for years with old equipment).
My personal upgrade cyccle used to be pure replacement after a couple of years of windows stuff. But is nowadays hard to compare because I do some own maintenance now (like keeping a 2010 Win 7 acer running on Linux from SSD since its harddrive crashed). But I am looking to reduce that sort of maintenance by switching to low-maintenance chromeboxes.
Speaking of “enthusiasts.” 😉
Better enthusiastic for planning outsourcing most of the tech-admin, than starting small by doing everything oneself and then growing the numbers & ending up doing a lot of tech admin.
Of course. For your use-case, at least.
I assumed that the view that keyboarded devices are more useful was universal (as in this research https://thejournal.com/articles/2016/09/08/research-laptops-chromebooks-and-tablets-most-valuable-education-tools-teachers-say.aspx)
Is there any reason to assume devices without keyboards are more useful?
Nope. I’m just immediately skeptical of anyone who sounds as though they’re claiming their personal preferences are somehow appropriate for every use case.
So am I. Particularly device based approaches.