volcan

sflocal said:

Sad, but the reality is that most schools will use what is the cheapest, not the best. 

They shouldn't buy the absolute cheapest that is just stupid. There are some Chromebooks that are very highly rated from $250 - $400. They come with all of the apps necessary for schoolwork, and in some cases even a little more than iPads come with, but the third party apps are pretty sparse compared to iOS. Chromebooks certainly have a better keyboard though. The one thing I would be concerned about is that you can't really trust Google to not save personal information of kids who are registered in a school group, even though they said they don't, but it was later discovered that they did anyway, so now they say they really don't save info anymore, believe us.

ChampionPower said:

Why doesn't Apple host all its own business on its own servers!

They don't have the infrastructure yet. It takes a long time to scale up especially since they want to do it with renewable energy. For every data center they build, they need to build the power infrastructure as well.

I don't think they particularly like AWS because it is kind of unreliable and slow, but they do have 42 data centers around the world. Microsoft has more than 100. They also use Akamai which has 50 data centers. Until Apple can get to a similar scale they have no choice but to use those third party providers. Apple has nearly a billion users and no where near enough infrastructure to serve them with only 4-5 data centers that they own, all in the US. Their China data centers are owned by the Chinese. Not sure how many there are there. Apple is planning to build 2 new data centers in Europe.

You can order many Apple products from Amazon and the shipping to Latin America is very reasonable. Problem is that much of Latin America does not have real street addresses so you have to ship to an ecommerce middleman shop and they charge an arm and a leg.

If they go with this design for the home button, they'll have to do something equally revolutionary with the top bezel, which could prove even more difficult than getting TouchID to work inside the pixels. You've got a camera, earpiece, proximity detector and even the camera module on the back may conflict with thickness of the touch screen layers.

melgross said:

So, is it paint, or anodization? The article uses both terms interchangeably. From the photos, it looks like paint, as anodized surfaces wear, but don't chip.

Anodizing aluminum normally leaves a slight metallic appearance. To get a matte finish the surface needs to be etched using either bead blasting or chemical etching with nitric acid, etc. Often after matte anodizing there are spots of darker or lighter color due to unevenness of the surface preparation and the darker the color and larger the surface, the more noticeable the spots are. Jet black matte is extremely difficult to do. Usually the parts need a much thicker anodizing layer and also need to be dyed to achieve a really dark color. You are correct that anodizing doesn't usually chip, although it can be scratched to expose the underlying alloy.

Judging by the photos I suspect that the actual buttons are anodized but the case itself appears to be painted, probably because of the difficulty in producing a uniform jet black matte finish on a large flat area. Perhaps a better solution would have been to anodize it first before painting it. At least then if it chipped it would still be black underneath. Paint actually sticks to anodized surfaces really well, much better than bare aluminum even with zinc chromate primer.