I'm not either. I've been saying that it seems dumb to buy kids iPads for school!!! Buy Chromebooks. They're CHEAP, have a real keyboard, and are more then good enough to do school work on. I have no idea how many games you can get for those things?!?!?! ipads are great, and you can use any Bluetooth Keyboard with them, but in the real world, for Kids use. the Chromebook makes much more sense. All in one at a lower price point and limited in what you can do with it. The iPad, you end up playing games on it instead of school work.
Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with a pen and paper to do school work on.
Agree. As a property owner paying taxes, Chromebooks are the way to go. They work great and they are cheap (cost-wise).
Looks to me like parents need to file some class-action suits to stop these teachers unions and administrators from (A) harming their children's education with substandard technology (no one in the real-world uses this junk), and (B) misspending taxpayer dollars.
They dump the upkeep, implementation, etc on existing teachers, provide minimal support (and usually that is dumped on an existing person) to keep costs down.
My mother teaches at a corporation with an Apple TV in every classroom and an iPad given to each teacher. No guidance whatsoever thereon, of course, just given.
I happened to rename her iPad and Apple TV so that they’re easier to find on the network for mirroring and AirPlay. Because the list is literally “MCLX3525JDSJ” “MCLX3526JDSJ” “MCLX3527JDSJ” and there’s no excuse for that.
It’s easier for her in class now, but she’s assaulted by all the other teachers, whining that they want the same thing done to theirs (because you can see all of them on the network from anywhere, which also means control could be taken at any time)...
I see questions all the time on Google's Chromebook forum from school students who want to know how to unlock their Chromebooks and bypass the restrictions set by their schools' Chromebook management %u2014 just like they do for iPads and every other piece of technology made available to them.
For the record, until Chromebooks came along, I have owned nothing but Macs since 1984, apart from an Acer netbook that I used to run Linux. My desktop iMac gets about 1% of my usage these days, my Chromebook 99%. No computer is perfect, of course, but Chromebooks come closer to Apple's old slogan "It just works" than anything else currently available.
It might help Apple's position if they were not so fractured. You can get an optional keyboard for the iPad. However the iPad teaches touch+keyboard use and Apple's OSX on their main computers teach only keyboard. It may be to Apple's advantage to follow rest of the world and put touch screens on their full sized computers too. Why are you training kids to use touch screens and then turn around tell them they don't need it? Just a thought.
@rob53 : I can use a Chromebook offline for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, watching video, viewing and editing images. There is no reason a student shouldn't be able to homework completely offline. Google provides excellent management tools to deploy and lock down Chromebooks in large numbers, which makes them a good fit for education. I see a lot of questions from schoolkids of the type, "How to I unlock" my Chromebook, to which the answer is always "Talk to your school."
With enough desire, of course, anything can be hacked, and kids are sharing tips for liberating Chromebooks, just as they do for iPads, Macs, and Windows PCs.
In short, Chromebooks fit their old, dated, failed teaching model and they like that because it doesn't require change. Whereas iPads would require, you know, work.
Do you actually know any teachers? Most that I know use Macs and iDevices for their personal use, so they know how they work and how to use them. The concerns about the keyboard in a teaching environment are 100% valid for two reasons: efficiency in typing/editting and use of screen space. If you want your kids to learn proper grammar and use proper punctuation (commas, quotes, semicolons, etc), the iOS keyboard is pretty bad. It's fine for Twitter posts and FB updates, it is NOT efficient for writting papers. And if you are writing and editting anything longer than a couple of paragraphs, so little of your text is visible on the screen, and copy-paste on a touch screen is still fairly painful, that you spend more time managing your document than organizing and expressing your thoughts.
A touch screen device (whether it be iPad, Android, or whatever) would likely be fine for some topics where visualization is a top requirement and it's more about viewing content than creating it (ie, science, music, etc). But if you want kids to be able to organize and present thoughts beyond 140 characters (a skill lacking in many of the job applications I see), you need a keyboard and a screen large enough to not get in the way.
As far as costs, yes that is a big concern for schools. Not only because of the intial costs, but since it seems so many things these days are viewed as disposable or as an entitlement, the ongoing costs due to misuse, loss, or accidental damage is a valid concern. There is a bit more risk involved in trusting a kid to take care of a $500 electronic device vs a $50 textbook.
I see questions all the time on Google's Chromebook forum from school students who want to know how to unlock their Chromebooks and bypass the restrictions set by their schools' Chromebook management %u2014 just like they do for iPads and every other piece of technology made available to them.
For the record, until Chromebooks came along, I have owned nothing but Macs since 1984, apart from an Acer netbook that I used to run Linux. My desktop iMac gets about 1% of my usage these days, my Chromebook 99%. No computer is perfect, of course, but Chromebooks come closer to Apple's old slogan "It just works" than anything else currently available.
I like the Chromebook updates. Hardly noticeable. OS X updates are a bit wearing. And OS X is getting more sluggish on older equipment.
As someone said, Chromebook OS just works. Cloud integration is great.
Another nice thing: plug in a hard drive and it is read without installing drivers (like Windows) or plug in a mouse and it just works. Printing can be an issue for some as you need a Cloud Print capable printer or have a PC or Mac tied to printer, but that's fine. You have a solution and many of us don't print anymore.
You can even plug in your iPhone to a Chromebook and your photos will synch.
It just works. And even Photoshop is coming to Chromebook as a web-app.
Some of us don't care for non-cloud based apps and avoid them if we can.
One of the execs from Google said Chromebooks were at 50% of the education market a while ago. The education market isn't all that large in terms of purchases made by institutions and apparently these make up 85% of Chromebook purchases. Parents/students that buy laptops themselves aren't buying Chromebooks.
Chromebook sales in 2013 were 2.1m and projected to be 5.2m this year. iPad sales in 2013 were 70m and projected to be 65m this year.
Apple can make a device like the Chromebook if they wanted to. They can't match the price as they have to add a profit margin but they can probably get close with a non-Retina Air and iPad-like internals. They'd have to make it exclusive to education buyers to avoid cutting into their Macbook line but it's not really worth doing for even 5m units at such low prices.
The potential US market is just under 50m students:
If every student gets a laptop at say $300, that's a revenue potential of $15b and for Apple, a profit of $3.75b vs their current yearly $39b. They wouldn't get 100% of the students but worldwide total could reach these figures. It doesn't seem like a huge concern, especially considering Apple will still appeal more to younger age groups with the iPads.
I personally never use an iPad for typing anything so I'm not surprised by it. There are a few reasons for this but a big one is having to prop up the tablet to type with a keyboard and take it down to interact via touch or extend an arm to the screen. They'd need to allow you to interact with the screen from the keyboard to make the iPad work efficiently this way. This can be done with gestures but the metal keyboard isn't ideal either:
I had previously mocked that up with a printed keyboard on it but they keys can be on the display and just show where you are pressing. This would be like how a wacom works where you draw on the displayless pad but your mind can adapt to the relation between the pad and the screen and autocorrect will help out. It can't use a cursor on-screen because that's a single input. It would need to show multiple input points. A device that's done this in the past put a shadow outline of the hands on the screen as an overlay to show where the hands were. There's examples of this with Leap Motion too:
[VIDEO]
It wouldn't be 3D hands on the iPad though, just flat and it could even just be fingers/fingertips. The fingertips (circles) could be joined with a line horizontally to give an awareness of which fingertip is which and they can shade them differently for in-contact or hovering. This allows typing on a virtual keyboard with hover and press. The virtual keyboard could be made smaller on-screen given that the user isn't having to press the key directly. I think it can even be a single line of letters and numbers where the characters zoom up like the Dock zoom and it shows which letter each finger is hovering over or just the first finger of each hand.
The pad would support full gestures and easily sits on a lap unlike the Microsoft Surface. To use it for touch, just fold it back and pick it up. They can potentially allow use in portrait it they can find a way to hold it in place but this wouldn't be essential as laptops are all landscape. They need to fix copy/paste on top of this (it should work like a magic marker and not a selector box - tap to select word, swipe down for lines, tap on/off for images). File sharing should be ok with AirDrop so students can all send work to the teacher directly and should be able to do it without wifi.
I really wonder if these Chromebooks keep your information private.
If I had a child in a school that used Chromebooks I'd demand assurance that no data or information about what my child does ever goes to Google or anyone outside the school. If my child uses a Google Drive account or gets assigned a Gmail account, I want that account to be locked down tight so that nothing or nobody at Google ever has access to information contained in them.
A Chromebook without the ability to mine data is 100% USELESS to Google. They don't exist to make Google money through the sales of hardware or services - they exist to give Google another source of information.
I'd be very interested to see what policies schools have in place for users of Chromebooks (if they even thought about it).
First, Google doesn't know who the users are, only the school that deploys them do. For instance my daughter logs into her Chromebook with a special email that looks like this, [student ID#]@[school suffix].org, it's not even a Google controlled account. Second, there are no ads displayed anywhere on a ChromeBook, even when the child surfs on public domains, adworks has been completely turned off. There is no tracking of individual data except for general information.
One of the execs from Google said Chromebooks were at 50% of the education market a while ago. The education market isn't all that large in terms of purchases made by institutions and apparently these make up 85% of Chromebook purchases. Parents/students that buy laptops themselves aren't buying Chromebooks.
Chromebook sales in 2013 were 2.1m and projected to be 5.2m this year.
iPad sales in 2013 were 70m and projected to be 65m this year.
Apple can make a device like the Chromebook if they wanted to. They can't match the price as they have to add a profit margin but they can probably get close with a non-Retina Air and iPad-like internals. They'd have to make it exclusive to education buyers to avoid cutting into their Macbook line but it's not really worth doing for even 5m units at such low prices.
The potential US market is just under 50m students:
If every student gets a laptop at say $300, that's a revenue potential of $15b and for Apple, a profit of $3.75b vs their current yearly $39b. They wouldn't get 100% of the students but worldwide total could reach these figures. It doesn't seem like a huge concern, especially considering Apple will still appeal more to younger age groups with the iPads.
I personally never use a laptop for typing anything so I'm not surprised by it. There are a few reasons for this but a big one is having to prop up the tablet to type with a keyboard and take it down to interact via touch or extend an arm to the screen. They'd need to allow you to interact with the screen from the keyboard to make the iPad work efficiently this way. This can be done with gestures but the metal keyboard isn't ideal either:
That's not portable and you can't easily use it in landscape. I think a horizontal gesture bar could work out e.g:
I had previously mocked that up with a printed keyboard on it but they keys can be on the display and just show where you are pressing. This would be like how a wacom works where you draw on the displayless pad but your mind can adapt to the relation between the pad and the screen and autocorrect will help out. It can't use a cursor on-screen because that's a single input. It would need to show multiple input points. A device that's done this in the past put a shadow outline of the hands on the screen as an overlay to show where the hands were. There's examples of this with Leap Motion too:
It wouldn't be 3D hands on the iPad though, just flat and it could even just be fingers/fingertips. The fingertips (circles) could be joined with a line horizontally to give an awareness of which fingertip is which and they can shade them differently for in-contact or hovering. This allows typing on a virtual keyboard with hover and press. The virtual keyboard could be made smaller on-screen given that the user isn't having to press the key directly. I think it can even be a single line of letters and numbers where the characters zoom up like the Dock zoom and it shows which letter each finger is hovering over or just the first finger of each hand.
The pad would support full gestures and easily sits on a lap unlike the Microsoft Surface. To use it for touch, just fold it back and pick it up. They can potentially allow use in portrait it they can find a way to hold it in place but this wouldn't be essential as laptops are all landscape. They need to fix copy/paste on top of this (it should work like a magic marker and not a selector box - tap to select word, swipe down for lines, tap on/off for images). File sharing should be ok with AirDrop so students can all send work to the teacher directly and should be able to do it without wifi.
Apple is not going to come out with a sub-$500 laptop, even if it was an iPad.
The iPad could have been a pretty awesome $500 laptop, but it would upset their pricing applecart, so to speak. Their structure would be a mess.
That is why the iPad is crippled and doesn't have ports like other tablets.
Apple wants a crippled laptop-likeish device below their $900 computers. They say you can have a $900 laptop or you can have a crippled device for $500.
I don't mean to be negative here. The iPad is crippled/limited. It's for a purpose. If everyone bought an Apple $500 laptop with a file system, it would make their profits and whole product and pricing structure crash.
It's amazing that Apple even allows keyboards to be used. If Chromebooks were a real credible threat to iPads, Apple would be changing its tune. Apple is ceding this market.
By the way, in our family we own iPhones and MacBooks and iPads.
As a tech that works in education, I beg to differ. We have a bunch of netbooks and are getting a ton of Chromebooks now in their place. The netbooks take forever to boot up and log in and lag horribly with even the most basic of tasks. Students get frustrated with them and starting ripping keys off of them and otherwise destroying them. Students can boot up, log into, and be accessing web content in less than a minute on Chromebook. It's snappy and it works well and we haven't had even near as many cases of vandalism with them. They just work and students love using them.
Not sure what old, dated, and failed teaching model you are referring to. Most content these days is now web-based and by putting Chromebooks into the classroom, we're forcing teachers to stop using the old software that barely runs anymore and start using more current web-based apps. Since it all runs in a standard web browser, students can go home and access the same content on whatever computer they have at home.
And let's talk about iPads and requiring work. Unless you've managed several hundred iPads, you have no idea what a nightmare they are to manage. Need a few new apps installed on all 360 iPads across the district? That's a few days of work at best right there. Centralized management of the devices is severely limited and full of gotchas depending on how you decided to initially deploy them. Updates to iOS are not automatic and take a significant amount of time per device. Expecting a teacher to manage this on their own is not reasonable expect for the more tech savvy teachers. All of my techs dread when they get a work ticket for an iPad and my school district is not alone in our agony. Compare that to Chromebooks where I can manage the apps and settings from a web interface and deploy a change to thousands of devices in a matter of a few minutes. Operating system updates on Chromebooks are automatic and take very little time to install.
And yes, money is a significant reason for our choices. We have a limited budget and need to make the most with what we have. If you can afford an iPad (and perhaps a keyboard and/or case) for every student and the tech staff required to support all of them, great. For those districts where we need to share devices with multiple students, iPads are not a realistic solution. They are intended to be a single user device and Apple's deployment recommendations are all for single-user scenarios. How do you use an educational app that tracks progress with multiple students? With all but the most basic of models costing at least $500 (plus keyboard and/or protective case), the total cost quickly adds up. Contrast this with Chromebooks that cost about $250-300 (with a Google management license) and we can lower the student to device ratio and not have to worry about increasing the number of techs needed to support them. We're able to get more technology in the hands of students for less effort on our part.
It's not a case of good enough. It's a case of people who actually work in education and understand all of the challenges, looking at all of the available devices and picking one that really works well. I'm a huge Apple fan and I tried to make iPads work as a viable solution. However, after rolling out a test set of Chromebooks and seeing how well they worked compared to the iPads we have, it was a no brainer.
Good insight info on supporting ipads vs chromebooks. I have a friend working for a private school about 1000 students as tech support has similar experiences. I hope Apple is listening and improve upon it. Hope iOS 9 will have the multi user accounts feature.
I really wonder if these Chromebooks keep your information private.
If I had a child in a school that used Chromebooks I'd demand assurance that no data or information about what my child does ever goes to Google or anyone outside the school. If my child uses a Google Drive account or gets assigned a Gmail account, I want that account to be locked down tight so that nothing or nobody at Google ever has access to information contained in them.
A Chromebook without the ability to mine data is 100% USELESS to Google. They don't exist to make Google money through the sales of hardware or services - they exist to give Google another source of information.
I'd be very interested to see what policies schools have in place for users of Chromebooks (if they even thought about it).
Hope you're restricting your children to use any social sites too. FB and others are collecting much more info than Google. FB owns its users. It knows your life, your friends, your relatives, your face, where you've been, what you like and what you hate. That's really scary.
These are the same teachers who are contributing to the production of a generation of dunces. Pardon me if I don't take their opinions too seriously.
In short, Chromebooks fit their old, dated, failed teaching model and they like that because it doesn't require change. Whereas iPads would require, you know, work.
$$$ is another reason. Yet another failed case of "good enough" thinking.
I guess you haven't heard of the Common Core curriculum adopted by every state. New teaching methods same failure result.
Comments
I'm not either. I've been saying that it seems dumb to buy kids iPads for school!!! Buy Chromebooks. They're CHEAP, have a real keyboard, and are more then good enough to do school work on. I have no idea how many games you can get for those things?!?!?! ipads are great, and you can use any Bluetooth Keyboard with them, but in the real world, for Kids use. the Chromebook makes much more sense. All in one at a lower price point and limited in what you can do with it. The iPad, you end up playing games on it instead of school work.
Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with a pen and paper to do school work on.
Agree. As a property owner paying taxes, Chromebooks are the way to go. They work great and they are cheap (cost-wise).
Better a Chromebook that Windows, of course!
My mother teaches at a corporation with an Apple TV in every classroom and an iPad given to each teacher. No guidance whatsoever thereon, of course, just given.
I happened to rename her iPad and Apple TV so that they’re easier to find on the network for mirroring and AirPlay. Because the list is literally “MCLX3525JDSJ” “MCLX3526JDSJ” “MCLX3527JDSJ” and there’s no excuse for that.
It’s easier for her in class now, but she’s assaulted by all the other teachers, whining that they want the same thing done to theirs (because you can see all of them on the network from anywhere, which also means control could be taken at any time)...
I see questions all the time on Google's Chromebook forum from school students who want to know how to unlock their Chromebooks and bypass the restrictions set by their schools' Chromebook management %u2014 just like they do for iPads and every other piece of technology made available to them.
For the record, until Chromebooks came along, I have owned nothing but Macs since 1984, apart from an Acer netbook that I used to run Linux. My desktop iMac gets about 1% of my usage these days, my Chromebook 99%. No computer is perfect, of course, but Chromebooks come closer to Apple's old slogan "It just works" than anything else currently available.
I find that hard to believe. Chrome books are just as crippled as net books.
I don't find it hard to believe at all. Most IT departments still hate Apple.
It might help Apple's position if they were not so fractured. You can get an optional keyboard for the iPad. However the iPad teaches touch+keyboard use and Apple's OSX on their main computers teach only keyboard. It may be to Apple's advantage to follow rest of the world and put touch screens on their full sized computers too. Why are you training kids to use touch screens and then turn around tell them they don't need it? Just a thought.
Because it puts them out of a job.
@rob53 : I can use a Chromebook offline for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, watching video, viewing and editing images. There is no reason a student shouldn't be able to homework completely offline. Google provides excellent management tools to deploy and lock down Chromebooks in large numbers, which makes them a good fit for education. I see a lot of questions from schoolkids of the type, "How to I unlock" my Chromebook, to which the answer is always "Talk to your school."
With enough desire, of course, anything can be hacked, and kids are sharing tips for liberating Chromebooks, just as they do for iPads, Macs, and Windows PCs.
In short, Chromebooks fit their old, dated, failed teaching model and they like that because it doesn't require change. Whereas iPads would require, you know, work.
Do you actually know any teachers? Most that I know use Macs and iDevices for their personal use, so they know how they work and how to use them. The concerns about the keyboard in a teaching environment are 100% valid for two reasons: efficiency in typing/editting and use of screen space. If you want your kids to learn proper grammar and use proper punctuation (commas, quotes, semicolons, etc), the iOS keyboard is pretty bad. It's fine for Twitter posts and FB updates, it is NOT efficient for writting papers. And if you are writing and editting anything longer than a couple of paragraphs, so little of your text is visible on the screen, and copy-paste on a touch screen is still fairly painful, that you spend more time managing your document than organizing and expressing your thoughts.
A touch screen device (whether it be iPad, Android, or whatever) would likely be fine for some topics where visualization is a top requirement and it's more about viewing content than creating it (ie, science, music, etc). But if you want kids to be able to organize and present thoughts beyond 140 characters (a skill lacking in many of the job applications I see), you need a keyboard and a screen large enough to not get in the way.
As far as costs, yes that is a big concern for schools. Not only because of the intial costs, but since it seems so many things these days are viewed as disposable or as an entitlement, the ongoing costs due to misuse, loss, or accidental damage is a valid concern. There is a bit more risk involved in trusting a kid to take care of a $500 electronic device vs a $50 textbook.
Hahahahaha!
Because it puts them out of a job.
Not even remotely accurate.
Not even remotely accurate.
I guess that’s why studies show it happening, huh. Mac-based setups always incur lower costs.
I like the Chromebook updates. Hardly noticeable. OS X updates are a bit wearing. And OS X is getting more sluggish on older equipment.
As someone said, Chromebook OS just works. Cloud integration is great.
Another nice thing: plug in a hard drive and it is read without installing drivers (like Windows) or plug in a mouse and it just works. Printing can be an issue for some as you need a Cloud Print capable printer or have a PC or Mac tied to printer, but that's fine. You have a solution and many of us don't print anymore.
You can even plug in your iPhone to a Chromebook and your photos will synch.
It just works. And even Photoshop is coming to Chromebook as a web-app.
Some of us don't care for non-cloud based apps and avoid them if we can.
Chromebook sales in 2013 were 2.1m and projected to be 5.2m this year.
iPad sales in 2013 were 70m and projected to be 65m this year.
Apple can make a device like the Chromebook if they wanted to. They can't match the price as they have to add a profit margin but they can probably get close with a non-Retina Air and iPad-like internals. They'd have to make it exclusive to education buyers to avoid cutting into their Macbook line but it's not really worth doing for even 5m units at such low prices.
The potential US market is just under 50m students:
http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372
If every student gets a laptop at say $300, that's a revenue potential of $15b and for Apple, a profit of $3.75b vs their current yearly $39b. They wouldn't get 100% of the students but worldwide total could reach these figures. It doesn't seem like a huge concern, especially considering Apple will still appeal more to younger age groups with the iPads.
I personally never use an iPad for typing anything so I'm not surprised by it. There are a few reasons for this but a big one is having to prop up the tablet to type with a keyboard and take it down to interact via touch or extend an arm to the screen. They'd need to allow you to interact with the screen from the keyboard to make the iPad work efficiently this way. This can be done with gestures but the metal keyboard isn't ideal either:
[IMG ALT=""]http://forums.appleinsider.com/content/type/61/id/52976/width/500/height/1000[/IMG]
That's not portable and you can't easily use it in landscape. I think a horizontal gesture bar could work out e.g:
[IMG ALT=""]http://forums.appleinsider.com/content/type/61/id/52977/width/500/height/1000[/IMG]
I had previously mocked that up with a printed keyboard on it but they keys can be on the display and just show where you are pressing. This would be like how a wacom works where you draw on the displayless pad but your mind can adapt to the relation between the pad and the screen and autocorrect will help out. It can't use a cursor on-screen because that's a single input. It would need to show multiple input points. A device that's done this in the past put a shadow outline of the hands on the screen as an overlay to show where the hands were. There's examples of this with Leap Motion too:
[VIDEO]
It wouldn't be 3D hands on the iPad though, just flat and it could even just be fingers/fingertips. The fingertips (circles) could be joined with a line horizontally to give an awareness of which fingertip is which and they can shade them differently for in-contact or hovering. This allows typing on a virtual keyboard with hover and press. The virtual keyboard could be made smaller on-screen given that the user isn't having to press the key directly. I think it can even be a single line of letters and numbers where the characters zoom up like the Dock zoom and it shows which letter each finger is hovering over or just the first finger of each hand.
The pad would support full gestures and easily sits on a lap unlike the Microsoft Surface. To use it for touch, just fold it back and pick it up. They can potentially allow use in portrait it they can find a way to hold it in place but this wouldn't be essential as laptops are all landscape. They need to fix copy/paste on top of this (it should work like a magic marker and not a selector box - tap to select word, swipe down for lines, tap on/off for images). File sharing should be ok with AirDrop so students can all send work to the teacher directly and should be able to do it without wifi.
First, Google doesn't know who the users are, only the school that deploys them do. For instance my daughter logs into her Chromebook with a special email that looks like this, [student ID#]@[school suffix].org, it's not even a Google controlled account. Second, there are no ads displayed anywhere on a ChromeBook, even when the child surfs on public domains, adworks has been completely turned off. There is no tracking of individual data except for general information.
One of the execs from Google said Chromebooks were at 50% of the education market a while ago. The education market isn't all that large in terms of purchases made by institutions and apparently these make up 85% of Chromebook purchases. Parents/students that buy laptops themselves aren't buying Chromebooks.
Chromebook sales in 2013 were 2.1m and projected to be 5.2m this year.
iPad sales in 2013 were 70m and projected to be 65m this year.
Apple can make a device like the Chromebook if they wanted to. They can't match the price as they have to add a profit margin but they can probably get close with a non-Retina Air and iPad-like internals. They'd have to make it exclusive to education buyers to avoid cutting into their Macbook line but it's not really worth doing for even 5m units at such low prices.
The potential US market is just under 50m students:
http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372
If every student gets a laptop at say $300, that's a revenue potential of $15b and for Apple, a profit of $3.75b vs their current yearly $39b. They wouldn't get 100% of the students but worldwide total could reach these figures. It doesn't seem like a huge concern, especially considering Apple will still appeal more to younger age groups with the iPads.
I personally never use a laptop for typing anything so I'm not surprised by it. There are a few reasons for this but a big one is having to prop up the tablet to type with a keyboard and take it down to interact via touch or extend an arm to the screen. They'd need to allow you to interact with the screen from the keyboard to make the iPad work efficiently this way. This can be done with gestures but the metal keyboard isn't ideal either:
That's not portable and you can't easily use it in landscape. I think a horizontal gesture bar could work out e.g:
I had previously mocked that up with a printed keyboard on it but they keys can be on the display and just show where you are pressing. This would be like how a wacom works where you draw on the displayless pad but your mind can adapt to the relation between the pad and the screen and autocorrect will help out. It can't use a cursor on-screen because that's a single input. It would need to show multiple input points. A device that's done this in the past put a shadow outline of the hands on the screen as an overlay to show where the hands were. There's examples of this with Leap Motion too:
It wouldn't be 3D hands on the iPad though, just flat and it could even just be fingers/fingertips. The fingertips (circles) could be joined with a line horizontally to give an awareness of which fingertip is which and they can shade them differently for in-contact or hovering. This allows typing on a virtual keyboard with hover and press. The virtual keyboard could be made smaller on-screen given that the user isn't having to press the key directly. I think it can even be a single line of letters and numbers where the characters zoom up like the Dock zoom and it shows which letter each finger is hovering over or just the first finger of each hand.
The pad would support full gestures and easily sits on a lap unlike the Microsoft Surface. To use it for touch, just fold it back and pick it up. They can potentially allow use in portrait it they can find a way to hold it in place but this wouldn't be essential as laptops are all landscape. They need to fix copy/paste on top of this (it should work like a magic marker and not a selector box - tap to select word, swipe down for lines, tap on/off for images). File sharing should be ok with AirDrop so students can all send work to the teacher directly and should be able to do it without wifi.
Apple is not going to come out with a sub-$500 laptop, even if it was an iPad.
The iPad could have been a pretty awesome $500 laptop, but it would upset their pricing applecart, so to speak. Their structure would be a mess.
That is why the iPad is crippled and doesn't have ports like other tablets.
Apple wants a crippled laptop-likeish device below their $900 computers. They say you can have a $900 laptop or you can have a crippled device for $500.
I don't mean to be negative here. The iPad is crippled/limited. It's for a purpose. If everyone bought an Apple $500 laptop with a file system, it would make their profits and whole product and pricing structure crash.
It's amazing that Apple even allows keyboards to be used. If Chromebooks were a real credible threat to iPads, Apple would be changing its tune. Apple is ceding this market.
By the way, in our family we own iPhones and MacBooks and iPads.
As a tech that works in education, I beg to differ. We have a bunch of netbooks and are getting a ton of Chromebooks now in their place. The netbooks take forever to boot up and log in and lag horribly with even the most basic of tasks. Students get frustrated with them and starting ripping keys off of them and otherwise destroying them. Students can boot up, log into, and be accessing web content in less than a minute on Chromebook. It's snappy and it works well and we haven't had even near as many cases of vandalism with them. They just work and students love using them.
Not sure what old, dated, and failed teaching model you are referring to. Most content these days is now web-based and by putting Chromebooks into the classroom, we're forcing teachers to stop using the old software that barely runs anymore and start using more current web-based apps. Since it all runs in a standard web browser, students can go home and access the same content on whatever computer they have at home.
And let's talk about iPads and requiring work. Unless you've managed several hundred iPads, you have no idea what a nightmare they are to manage. Need a few new apps installed on all 360 iPads across the district? That's a few days of work at best right there. Centralized management of the devices is severely limited and full of gotchas depending on how you decided to initially deploy them. Updates to iOS are not automatic and take a significant amount of time per device. Expecting a teacher to manage this on their own is not reasonable expect for the more tech savvy teachers. All of my techs dread when they get a work ticket for an iPad and my school district is not alone in our agony. Compare that to Chromebooks where I can manage the apps and settings from a web interface and deploy a change to thousands of devices in a matter of a few minutes. Operating system updates on Chromebooks are automatic and take very little time to install.
And yes, money is a significant reason for our choices. We have a limited budget and need to make the most with what we have. If you can afford an iPad (and perhaps a keyboard and/or case) for every student and the tech staff required to support all of them, great. For those districts where we need to share devices with multiple students, iPads are not a realistic solution. They are intended to be a single user device and Apple's deployment recommendations are all for single-user scenarios. How do you use an educational app that tracks progress with multiple students? With all but the most basic of models costing at least $500 (plus keyboard and/or protective case), the total cost quickly adds up. Contrast this with Chromebooks that cost about $250-300 (with a Google management license) and we can lower the student to device ratio and not have to worry about increasing the number of techs needed to support them. We're able to get more technology in the hands of students for less effort on our part.
It's not a case of good enough. It's a case of people who actually work in education and understand all of the challenges, looking at all of the available devices and picking one that really works well. I'm a huge Apple fan and I tried to make iPads work as a viable solution. However, after rolling out a test set of Chromebooks and seeing how well they worked compared to the iPads we have, it was a no brainer.
Good insight info on supporting ipads vs chromebooks. I have a friend working for a private school about 1000 students as tech support has similar experiences. I hope Apple is listening and improve upon it. Hope iOS 9 will have the multi user accounts feature.
I really wonder if these Chromebooks keep your information private.
If I had a child in a school that used Chromebooks I'd demand assurance that no data or information about what my child does ever goes to Google or anyone outside the school. If my child uses a Google Drive account or gets assigned a Gmail account, I want that account to be locked down tight so that nothing or nobody at Google ever has access to information contained in them.
A Chromebook without the ability to mine data is 100% USELESS to Google. They don't exist to make Google money through the sales of hardware or services - they exist to give Google another source of information.
I'd be very interested to see what policies schools have in place for users of Chromebooks (if they even thought about it).
Hope you're restricting your children to use any social sites too. FB and others are collecting much more info than Google. FB owns its users. It knows your life, your friends, your relatives, your face, where you've been, what you like and what you hate. That's really scary.
I guess you haven't heard of the Common Core curriculum adopted by every state. New teaching methods same failure result.