Apple’s iPad Fights For the Education Market

The education market is very price sensitive. Three players are in a pitched battle for the right-priced personal computer: Apple (iOS/iPad), Google (Chrome OS + Android), and Microsoft (Windows 10 Cloud). These OSes and their implementation on hardware, plus the right kind of marketing and staying power, could determine which company seizes the hearts and minds of schools and students.

Apple’s weapon of choice in education: iPad

The Particle Debris article of the week is a beautifully written article at The Verge by Dieter Bohn.

Apple vs Google vs Microsoft: who will get to the future of PCs first?

The author lays out the competitive scenario, the three players and their offerings, and explains each in detail with respect to education.

For starters, author Bohn looks at how Google and the Chrome OS is beginning to evolve. For example, an inexpensive PC notebook with a real keyboard and Chrome OS has been giving Apple headaches in some markets, but Chrome OS is just a browser—which limits some pedagogical efforts. But if you add the ability to run Android apps, the game changes. The challenge is scaling Android apps to the larger displays of notebooks,

The Way of the iPad

Next, the author looks at Apple and the iPad. iOS is perfectly integrated into the hardware. Apple just released a new, low end US$329 iPad, very much like an iPad Air except with an A9 CPU. We know that educational pricing can be even lower, especially in quantity. So Apple has a real weapon here.

One problem is that some school districts are not so fond of the virtual keyboard notion when it comes to educating students about computers. I read once that, for certain testing, real keyboards had to be attached. Also, for some kinds of advanced work, the iPad apps, especially when it comes to programming, are fewer and lower quality than desired. In general, author Bohn contends that the iPad still requires some technical growth and multi-user accounts. But, for now, the iPad is formidable, low cost offering for primary and secondary education.

Finally, Microsoft’s education strategy is outlined. We’ll know more in May, but Microsoft seems to be leaning towards a more lightweight version of Windows 10. The perils and benefits of a lightweight version of Windows 10 are explained nicely. Remember the Windows RT (ARM) debacle? On the other hand, the key to inexpensive hardware is an OS that doesn’t impose too many demands. The discussion here is illuminating.

Thoughts on Apple

Apple doesn’t want to give up this market, even if it’s a small part of the business. Experience has shown that kids tend to stay with the platform they grew up with and learned with. The real question is how far Apple is willing to go with iOS and the hardware to fully cater to the educational market even as the company advances the iPad state of the art for the majority of other iPad customers.

Also, as students graduate to the college level and full feature notebooks running macOS, Windows 10 and Linux, it’s likely seen as more respectable to open up a notebook lid and type on a real keyboard. Young students want to be ready to be more mature students. Can Apple convince students and schools that a tablet with a virtual keyboard really is the future, even as it invests millions in designing the Touch Bar MacBook Pros for grownups?

This easy to read but detailed and informative article at The Verge, is must reading for any Apple enthusiast, especially educators.

Next Page: The News Debris For The Week Of April 10th. The evolution of various technologies over the years.

Page 2 – News Debris For The Week Of April 10th

The Evolution of Technologies Over the Years

 

Early, primitive VRML in our 1990s browsers.

Remember Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML) from the 1990s? I do. Well, maybe some of the younger readers won’t. VRML was way ahead of its time. But now pure VR is in vogue. What happened along the way? This article at Motherboard tells the story. “VR Was the ‘Next Big Thing’ 20 Years Ago. What’s Different Now?”

Plus, from the next article, comes a new concept (for me anyway). Diminished realty.

Augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality are three realities that exist on the reality-virtuality continuum—and they are probably the three terms you have heard again and again.  However, there is a fourth reality you probably haven’t heard of—diminished reality.

For the details, see: “New opportunities for augmented reality.”

Moving on….

Over at 9to5Mac Zac Hall lays it out: “WWDC Wishlist: How Apple TV could improve with tvOS 11 this year.” He covers it all, and there’s more opportunity for tvOS than you may have thought about. A good read.

Human beings just aren’t designed for boring, repetitive, strenuous jobs. But we’ve pressed them into service for that kind thing for centuries because there was no other recourse. So when you see videos like this, you may think, robots will put us all out of work!  But that’s also a good thing. Humans should be freed up to do much more interesting, creative things. That’s what my wife tells her college students. (Some aren’t yet listening.) Anyway, for a tasty, intriguing video (reminiscent of an ant farm), see: “Good news: the robot that takes your job might be cute enough to go viral.”

Next. We haven’t heard much about Apple’s car project. The wind seemed to go out of those sails when we learned that Apple likely wouldn’t elect to go toe-to-toe with Tesla. Instead, Apple may be looking at designing the software for an autonomous system, a system that Apple would market to other car companies. Personally, I don’t think that’s going to work out because car companies want ownership/control and transparency into this kind of software. Even so, Apple seems to be moving forward. “Apple Receives Permit From California DMV to Test Self-Driving Cars.”

We often hear about how Apple may have peaked. Claims are made that Apple is now substituting extracted revenue for innovation. In any case, companies struggle to become large and powerful—at which point a whole new set of problems arise. Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, is aware of that. Here’s how he intends to avoid the fate of a big company gone wrong. “This is the Jeff Bezos playbook for preventing Amazon’s demise.” As an exercise, read the article a second time and replace “Amazon” with “Apple.” See how it works.

Finally, remember when Google was going to scan every book in print and make them all available on the Internet? The project was Google Book Search. Backchannel tells the story about lawsuits stalled Google’s early efforts. Fifteen years later, the momentum and passion is gone.

Google Book Search is amazing that way. When it started almost 15 years ago, it also seemed impossibly ambitious: An upstart tech company that had just tamed and organized the vast informational jungle of the web would now extend the reach of its search box into the offline world. By scanning millions of printed books from the libraries with which it partnered, it would import the entire body of pre-internet writing into its database.

The article goes on to explain how this project foundered a bit.

Yet the Books fight was never as central to Google’s corporate being as that kind of all-consuming conflict. And it wasn’t all a waste, either. It taught Google something valuable.

It’s easy in this age of the fiber Internet, exabyte storage, and supercomputers to conceive of grand plans. But whether a tech giant can stay with the vision, retain its key people, deal with legalities, implement the plan soundly, scale it, and extract long term value, before the technology landscape changes, is another thing altogether. This article is an excellent case in point.

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Particle Debris is a generally a mix of John Martellaro’s observations and opinions about a standout event or article of the week (preamble on page one) followed on page two by a discussion of articles that didn’t make the tmo headlines, the technical news debris. The column is published most every Friday except for holidays.

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