gumbi

rogifan_new said:

lkrupp said:

Schools are ditching iPads for $200 ChromeBooks and this thing is supposedly aimed at the educational market? What the hell is going on here? And what about the AI trolls who are always bitching about MacBooks with the same amount of RAM and storage? This sounds really gefickt to me.

It was a confused event.  Microsoft was billing it as an education event. So naturally people are assuming k-12 and a chromebook competitor. Instead they announce a laptop designed to compete with the MacBook or MacBook Air not a chrome book.  It's like they didn't think they could have an event just to announce the laptop so they threw some education stuff in there to try and make it a complete event. People talk about Apple's sometimes confusing naming conventions. Here we have Surface Pro, Surface Book and now Surface Laptop. How is that not confusing?

No it wasn't.   Windows 10s is what they are targeting at K-12.  The Surface Laptop is not targeted at that market at all - there are several hardware vendors that are making the hardware for that market - starting at the $189 price point. 

It's typical, but, apple users have NO clue as to what Windows 10s is.  Windows 10s IS Windows 10 Pro with a couple of modifications - mainly involving startup, locking it to the windows store (a feature that is actually in Windows 10 Creators Update), and it can't be managed through on premise AD.  Windows 10s is meant to be managed by cloud by a cloud based MDM solution (Intune for education being the main one).  The point of windows 10s is to compete with ChromeOS - cheap hardware and easy to manage.  Most American school districts have very little in the way of funds for IT, so can't spend money on expensive devices and device management.  This is why Chromebooks are so popular in this market - and are eroding both Apple's and Microsoft's market share in that area (if you look at the actual numbers it has much more harm to Apple then MS at this point, but, it's only a matter of time before it starts really hurting MS as well).   What Windows 10 s gives them is a secure easily managed and restricted environment with the ability to easily switch profiles.  

Being locked to the Windows store in that environment is not really a hindrance -  its a safety and performance feature.  It seems to be little realized, but, even Win32 desktop applications can be made available to the Windows store via the Centennial bridge.   There are a number of those applications on the store today - Adobe Photoshop Elements 15 being one example.  Full Microsoft Office will also soon becoming to the Windows store as was announced today along with the Spotify desktop application.