Apple and education: Four decades of highs and lows
A continuing theme throughout Apple's history, from early years of Steve Jobs to today, has been education. AppleInsider examines the efforts -- some successful, some not -- to appeal directly to the education market.
On Tuesday, Apple is scheduled to host its event at the Lane Tech College Prep High School in Chicago, where the company says it will share "creative ideas for teachers and students." The event is expected to include the introduction of a new, possibly less expensive iPad, while also touting the Swift programming partnership that Apple launched last year with Chicago Public Schools and the City Colleges of Chicago.
The event Tuesday is far from Apple's first foray into the education market, as even in Apple's earliest days, schools have been a major customer and partner for the company's computers.
Steve Jobs said in an interview with the Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program in 1995 during the NeXT Computer era, that "one of the things that built [the] Apple II was schools buying Apple IIs."
Following a failed effort in Congress to pass a massive tax credit in the waning days of the Carter administration to enable nationwide donations of computers, Apple turned to California. After the state's governor signed a bill in 1982 to grant a tax credit, the company donated Apple IIe computers to around 9,000 schools in its home state.
The proliferation of these computers in schools helped Apple get an early foothold in the education market. Later in the Smithsonian interview, Jobs said that "I've helped with more computers in more schools than anybody else in the world," but noted that machines can't make as much of an impact on students' lives as "a person," meaning a teacher or parent, can.
After disagreement of how much to cater to the education market was part of his dispute with CEO John Sculley, Jobs left Apple in 1985. He went on to found NeXT Computer, whose signature workstation product was specifically aimed at educational institutions.
During Jobs' years away, Apple introduced the eMate 300, a personal digital assistant for the education market, featuring a stylus and touchscreen interface, and touted as "designed to take the rugged lifestyle of a student's computer in K-12 secondary education."
The eMate hit the market in the spring of 1997 as a much lower-cost alternative to the PCs of the time. But the product ended up lasting less than a year on the market.
Jobs returned to Apple when the company acquired NeXT in 1997. One of the first things he did was kill the Newton, and with it, the eMate. Then came the Power Macintosh G3 All-In-One, commonly called the "molar," which arrived in the spring of 1998 with the same computing architecture and components as the Beige G3 tower and desktop.
But, as with the eMate, Jobs killed it a year later. The colorful, all-in-one Bondi 233 Mhz G3 iMac followed, a familiar shape that would anchor computer labs for years to come.
Also in 1999, Dell overtook Apple as the top seller off computers to educational institutions in the U.S. Two years earlier, Jobs had famously trashed Dell CEO Michael Dell and his product, placing a target over his face and declaring "we're coming after you, buddy."
Jobs held the grudge until at least 2006, when Apple's stock valuation overtook Dell's.
In the shadow of the relatively expensive iMac G4, Apple unveiled the eMac, a desktop computer specifically aimed at the educational market in 2002. It later grew so popular that it was sold to the mass market for a few years. Several models of the eMac, including the launch 700MHz and 800MHz models, were plagued with substandard capacitors like most of the consumer electronics of the day.
Apple took a different tack a few years later, when it began selling white polycarbonate MacBooks to the educational market, after they had been phased out from the general public. The white MacBooks were finally taken off the market for new sales in 2012 -- but were provided to schools to fulfill contracts through 2015.
One program in the Los Angeles Unified School District spectacularly failed, but not by Apple's hand directly. The plan to buy iPads for every student in Los Angeles was a high-profile debacle mostly because of mismanagement by the school district and content provider Pearson, resulting in the program's termination.
On Apple's education website the company touts all of the things Apple's products can do in the classroom. The photos on the site are very iPad-heavy -- there's only one Mac visible on the landing page, and even it is only used for device management. In his time as Apple CEO, Tim Cook has often been a visitor to schools that utilize Apple technology.
There have been indications that Apple's products have fallen out of favor in classrooms. A report by FutureSource Consulting in 2017 found that Apple's devices have fallen to third place, behind Google Chromebook and Microsoft Windows, in present classroom usage. The low cost of those devices, compared to the more costly -- and more theft-prone -- Macs and iPads, are seen as the main driver for the plunge.
Districts that have selected Apple products as an underpinning for an educational strategy cite their easy deployment and low support burden as benefits to the program, despite being up to three or four times more per seat than a Chromebook or similar outfit. Unless donated, Apple's products have never been inexpensive -- but Tuesday's event might narrow the gap a bit.
On Tuesday, Apple is scheduled to host its event at the Lane Tech College Prep High School in Chicago, where the company says it will share "creative ideas for teachers and students." The event is expected to include the introduction of a new, possibly less expensive iPad, while also touting the Swift programming partnership that Apple launched last year with Chicago Public Schools and the City Colleges of Chicago.
The event Tuesday is far from Apple's first foray into the education market, as even in Apple's earliest days, schools have been a major customer and partner for the company's computers.
The Apple II Goes to school
In 1978, Apple made a deal with the Minnesota Education Computing Consortium (MECC), in which it supplied 500 computers for that state's schools. The deal, which came at the conclusion of a lengthy bidding process, allowed schools in that state to purchase the computers directly from MECC. By 1982, MECC was the largest seller of Apple computers.Steve Jobs said in an interview with the Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program in 1995 during the NeXT Computer era, that "one of the things that built [the] Apple II was schools buying Apple IIs."
Following a failed effort in Congress to pass a massive tax credit in the waning days of the Carter administration to enable nationwide donations of computers, Apple turned to California. After the state's governor signed a bill in 1982 to grant a tax credit, the company donated Apple IIe computers to around 9,000 schools in its home state.
The proliferation of these computers in schools helped Apple get an early foothold in the education market. Later in the Smithsonian interview, Jobs said that "I've helped with more computers in more schools than anybody else in the world," but noted that machines can't make as much of an impact on students' lives as "a person," meaning a teacher or parent, can.
Enter the Mac
Apple made its next big education push with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. Apple made a huge effort to get Macs into colleges, reaching deals with 24 top universities, including the entire Ivy League, Jobs said in an interview at the time. While the reception of the original Mac was mixed at the time, Macs became a big presence at universities, and they would remain one for decades.After disagreement of how much to cater to the education market was part of his dispute with CEO John Sculley, Jobs left Apple in 1985. He went on to found NeXT Computer, whose signature workstation product was specifically aimed at educational institutions.
During Jobs' years away, Apple introduced the eMate 300, a personal digital assistant for the education market, featuring a stylus and touchscreen interface, and touted as "designed to take the rugged lifestyle of a student's computer in K-12 secondary education."
The eMate hit the market in the spring of 1997 as a much lower-cost alternative to the PCs of the time. But the product ended up lasting less than a year on the market.
Jobs returned to Apple when the company acquired NeXT in 1997. One of the first things he did was kill the Newton, and with it, the eMate. Then came the Power Macintosh G3 All-In-One, commonly called the "molar," which arrived in the spring of 1998 with the same computing architecture and components as the Beige G3 tower and desktop.
But, as with the eMate, Jobs killed it a year later. The colorful, all-in-one Bondi 233 Mhz G3 iMac followed, a familiar shape that would anchor computer labs for years to come.
Also in 1999, Dell overtook Apple as the top seller off computers to educational institutions in the U.S. Two years earlier, Jobs had famously trashed Dell CEO Michael Dell and his product, placing a target over his face and declaring "we're coming after you, buddy."
Jobs held the grudge until at least 2006, when Apple's stock valuation overtook Dell's.
Apple, Education and the New Millennium
In 2001, Apple announced the $62 million acquisition of PowerSchool, described as "the leading provider of web-based student information systems for K-12 schools and school districts." Apple sold PowerSchool to Pearson in 2006 after doing little with it, as part of an expanded partnership between the companies on textbooks. A PowerSchool Mobile app is available in the App Store.In the shadow of the relatively expensive iMac G4, Apple unveiled the eMac, a desktop computer specifically aimed at the educational market in 2002. It later grew so popular that it was sold to the mass market for a few years. Several models of the eMac, including the launch 700MHz and 800MHz models, were plagued with substandard capacitors like most of the consumer electronics of the day.
Apple took a different tack a few years later, when it began selling white polycarbonate MacBooks to the educational market, after they had been phased out from the general public. The white MacBooks were finally taken off the market for new sales in 2012 -- but were provided to schools to fulfill contracts through 2015.
In Recent Years...
When the iPad was unveiled in 2010, Apple began strongly touting its educational uses, with various school districts around the country buying iPads the way they had early Apple computers, decades before. Most of the programs were unqualified successes, despite being generally more expensive than the competition.One program in the Los Angeles Unified School District spectacularly failed, but not by Apple's hand directly. The plan to buy iPads for every student in Los Angeles was a high-profile debacle mostly because of mismanagement by the school district and content provider Pearson, resulting in the program's termination.
Look to the past to predict the future
Apple held an education event, similar to this week's in New York back in 2012, when it debuted iBooks 2 for the iPad. Apple debuted its Classroom app, meant to provide a toolset to teachers, in 2016, along with iOS 9.3.On Apple's education website the company touts all of the things Apple's products can do in the classroom. The photos on the site are very iPad-heavy -- there's only one Mac visible on the landing page, and even it is only used for device management. In his time as Apple CEO, Tim Cook has often been a visitor to schools that utilize Apple technology.
There have been indications that Apple's products have fallen out of favor in classrooms. A report by FutureSource Consulting in 2017 found that Apple's devices have fallen to third place, behind Google Chromebook and Microsoft Windows, in present classroom usage. The low cost of those devices, compared to the more costly -- and more theft-prone -- Macs and iPads, are seen as the main driver for the plunge.
Districts that have selected Apple products as an underpinning for an educational strategy cite their easy deployment and low support burden as benefits to the program, despite being up to three or four times more per seat than a Chromebook or similar outfit. Unless donated, Apple's products have never been inexpensive -- but Tuesday's event might narrow the gap a bit.
Comments
Cost is just one factor but there are other equally important factors that Apple has fallen behind in education. And most of that has to do on the software & services side. I think the latter is what we'll hear about mostly come tomorrow.
Also, you glossed over why Jobs wasn't happy with Michael Dell. Michael Dell makes an infamously bleak appraisal of Apple’s fortunes. Asked what he would do with Apple, the founder of Dell Inc. says he would “shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”
And people thought Jobs was arrogant.
Fast forward some 20 years later and look where Apple and Dell are now.
This is why you think before you speak. Otherwise it can come back to bite you.
Certainly an iconic design.
And for years, that was enough as iPads exploded.
Problem is. It's never cheap enough, is it? With Apple asleep at the wheel post Steve Jobs. The core markets seem to have been neglected in focus. Creative, Edu, Small Business. Sure the race for the consumer has made Apple the biggest company on Earth. You need Mac Pros to create. You need Edu' users for the next wave of Apple customers. Small business is still 'enterprise/entrepreneur...'
Look at Apple's products for those markets... No Mac Pro. You can't call the current one current. It's 5 years out of date with the same wallet busting price. You can't upgrade it. It's slow. It's a design cut-de-sac. Go back to Steve's Blue and White Tower mission statement keynote. It's like a completely different Apple. How did they stray so far from their base. Steve outlined 7 core markets (yes, including games...) and Apple seem to have lost their load in most of them...and apparently, don't know their core customers? That's what happens when Sales and Marketing rather than product guys take over. They stop looking and listening to the core base.
The Apple Park should be a fitting epitaph to Steve Job's Apple. And it is. But for Tim's? A complement monument to laziness and hubris. Billions more in the bank. But the Mac line has withered on the vine. The iMac Pro is good. But it's over expensive for what it is. You can build an 8 core AMD Ryzen or buy it from (not cheap either) PC World here in the UK for £2k. Add the LG 5k for another £1k ish? That's 2k less than the iMac Pro. And no ram slot on the back? Really? The consumer iMac has that. How bizarre. But the Pro one doesn't?
If anything showed how out of touch and complacent Apple was with the Mac line, if looking at 5 year old state models in the Mac Pro and Mac Mini wasn't enough...we got a Macbook update with the tiny 'break the flow' touch strip. M$ gave us the Studio. It made the iMac look painfully out of date with a design that is much older than it appears. Bar the slimming of the bevels on the edges, how old is that design now? We had the pioneering Luxor iMac years before that too! It was like M$ and Apple have swapped places.
Remember when Jobs came back to Apple and teh mac Quadrant got updated at a relative insane pace? What's with the upsell with even pricer mark ups, what's with making the iMac have no model under 1k? You get a non retina duo core for £1050k here in the Uk. That's rubbish. Pure crap.
The Pro went from being £2500 to £3k overnight. Sure, we'd feel the pain of Brexit, but it's not like Apple would feel it with us. We'd pay £500 more for out of date 4 core crap in a proprietary mess. The Mac Pro is an antique boutique.
Apple finished the Apple Park and in that time? No Mac Pro. Constructing monuments or a base to take forward Steve's vision?
My point?
iMacs used to be in the £595-£995 bracket. They should have driven that down to £395-£795 and another higher end option at £995. It used to be the Mac for the 'rest of us.' Now, it's an example of how Apple strayed from their core. ie. At the prices I suggest, Apple could have had the desktop solution for education. Same with their iBook.
It was about £695 here in the Uk for the low end model at some point. They could have driven that down to £495 for the low end with the premium model at £995. Keep the pro laptop for £995 to £2995 like the Mac Tower. But no. We have the Macbook, the Air (they pull the cheap 11 inch model...) and the hyper premium Macbook Pro.
From there? Let the tower take over in the £995 to £1995 to £2995 bracket...with a design that suits the gamer, the musician, small business and creative developer crowds. It's a hot mess at the moment, Apple's desktop strategy. Updates have been sparse over the last five years. Milking out of date tech' at insane prices.
Erode your base at your peril.
Teachers need an end to end solution. Apple don't have it.
You need admin. Google get that. Apple don't.
Trying to Admin a class of iPads and store them was a hot mess.
You need books. (e.g. buy a book company and give teachers curriculum content.)
And you need cheap hardware. £250 iPad was the target price. Missed it by £50. It's not like they couldn't make money on pens (good price for what it is...) and the extortionate and uncomfy iPad keyboards they sell. The iPad should have a magnet release k/b by now. PC two in ones have that. Apple's solution is floppy and cheap but premium priced. A design kludge.
Where's the lightweight ARM based iPad laptop? The iPad k/b turns the iPad into a £500+ device with pen. Again with the upsell. Where's the all in one solution?
It's not there in teh hardware or software. Bits and pieces. Maybe half way there. But it's that. Half baked.
But like all Apple computers. Lots of promise. But they don't follow through because they're more pleased on 'wow' factor, nickle and diming customers and pleasing shareholders than rounding out their products for a fair price.
Lemon Bon Bon.
Lemon Bon Bon.
And with iOS. They sure have the profits. For now. Are Chromebooks netbooks?
I think they could have leveraged that to push the Mac deeper into enemy territory. Instead they seemed to have ceded ground.
They don't even advertise the Mac. I guess their stores do that.
Very 'aspirational.'
I look back at that Blue and White Tower Steve Note and think...of what 'could' have been.
Maybe Apple doesn't care that much because of iOS £££ and the Mac will be subsumed into something else in the next two years...
Steve did say he'd milk the Mac for all it was worth and move onto the next big thing...
Maybe iOS is only doing to Mac what Mac did to Apple II? But the Mac isn't a failing product with concerning sales.
Apple should be aggressive on updates with aggressive prices.
That doesn't mean as cheap as the opposition. But £1495 tower compared to a £3k tower? What is that? That isn't twenty years of progress.
When PC World (in the uk) can blow Apple's entry Mac Pro for a £1k cheaper out the water the Mac has problems. And so does Apple. They don't know they core anymore.
Lemon Bon Bon.