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Apple Losing Out To Microsoft and Google in US Classrooms (macrumors.com)
Apple is losing its grip on American classrooms, which technology companies have long used to hook students on their brands for life. From a report on MacRumors: According to research company Futuresource Consulting, in 2016 the number of devices in American classrooms that run iOS and macOS fell to third place behind both Google-powered laptops and Windows devices. Out of 12.6 million mobile devices shipped to primary and secondary schools in the U.S., Chromebooks accounted for 58 percent of the market, up from 50 percent in 2015. Meanwhile, school shipments of iPads and Mac laptops fell to 19 percent, from about 25 percent, over the same period, while Microsoft Windows laptops and tablets stayed relatively stable at about 22 percent.
I have the feeling price may be a factor here.
That's what happens when you overcharge for three-years-old technology.
and not on professional tools anymore, ...
Let's be real, most workplaces use Windows/Linux. So kids are better off.
My children's first computer was the Apple clone, Franklin, which was sued out of existence. I didn't want to buy an Apple, but my kids needed what everyone else was using. Those days of the 1980s have long passed.
The fewer tablets that can distract, the better. Shall we go back to pen and paper, until the marketdroids sort this puzzle out? Can these kids do basic math to figure out their lunch money change, without opening a calculator app?
Microsoft sent me a boxed copy of J++. It was the embrace extend extinguish days and it was their stab at java. I was more pissed at the school selling my info to a tech company than anything else, but it was early days and now that is par for the course.
Old man ramble over, my point is apple doesn't have shit to give away. Anyone with a mac already has xcode, garage band, whatever. They make no money on software, and they're not going to hook students by giving away free iphones. They already have hooked half of them anyway. Based on recent hardware revisions it's clear they give zero shits about traditional laptops / desktops.
Chromebooks are so much easier to manage and maintain from the get-go, without having to purchase any other management software. Just using the G-Suite admin console lets us keep tens of thousands of these devices up to date, and with the necessary apps pushed out. Windows was a nightmare. We didn't even bother with Apple.
No school should accept to be vendor locked-in. Making all students to buy a device from a single vendor, buying (and maybe even developing) applications for that platform, and not being able to switch easily to another hardware provider is dumb.
At least with chromebooks and Windows PCs, you have plenty of choice of hardware vendors, which is a huge step above Apple.
You remain locked-in to a software OS, but especially for the chromebook I expect most applications to be web based and should work on any OS.
Back in the 80s Apple pioneered mainstream computing in classrooms. They had very active educational programs and, most importantly, did the accounting, training, and political legwork that made it easy for schools to adapt apple hardware.
A smart sales rep would sell the program to your board or state education department. You could send your teachers to training where they got their own computer to train on and take home.
They worked closely with the legendary MECC to help create those early educational titles of legend all kids of the 80s remember (some fondly)
Apple, now, doesn't do any of that stuff. Why? Who knows. Probably because they don't think it's worth their time and effort.
Google and Microsoft, on the other hand, are aggressively making it easy for Schools to acquire and manage cloud based services. Google in particular is a DREAM for a school IT department to manage thousands of Chromebooks through easy web based utilities.
The real news is that Google is eating Microsoft's school lunch in the US, and starting to become noticeable abroad. Not that I am in love with Google but, as of today, it is vastly preferable over the Redmond beast.
Are we talking about actual computers or tablets and web appliances.
A good test may be if you can write and run a C program.
Personally in IT and we have chromebooks (10k almost), iPads and PCs. Ipads by far are the hardest to manage and I think have the least instructional value.
-We can't afford an MDM like Casper or Meraki so I use Apple's half-baked profile manager software which is pretty terrible. I know it's more of less free, but if they cared about getting education market share they might want to come up with something a little better. Chromebook management model is an extra $35 for a lifetime license fee which is baked-in and much easier for the purchasers to swallow. Oh yea, free google apps as well and the google admin console is a DREAM. It also integrates with Active Directory via Google Apps Directory Sync and I have SSO set up with SimpleSamlPHP. It's awesome.
-Because I have a MDM that I'm constantly scared is going to crash (I've had to rebuild it twice trying to get app deployment to work, ultimately it didn't and couldn't get apple to figure out why) I don't trust using the Device Enrollment Program so you NEED a mac to use the configurator for initial setup. I would say Chromebooks are an order of magnitude faster to deploy.
-iPads don't have keyboards. Chromebooks are cheaper and have a keyboard so you can do ACTUAL WORK.
-Apple constantly has trouble getting us on-site repairs
Apple makes shiny single-user devices and I'm glad they missed the boat on education. I only hope I can get people to stop buying the products because "We can't use photoshop on a PC!", just get a bigger monitor and you'll save hundreds!
Rant over. That felt great.
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Is Apple slowly turning into a "has been" just as the doughnut is ready?
Managing them, at least in my school system, was a nightmare. It cost money any way we looked at it, money we didn't have. If they had just built active directory hooks, or given us a way to manage them for free, or less than inflated 3rd party mdm pricing, we might have supported them, we decided not to, but the schools are autonomous. They bought them anyway, then cried when we said we wouldn't touch them. They tried self management, paid for MDM, etc. and no one knew how to work any of it... It was funny.
"Science is the power of man"
The Apple tablets also have problems with SSO and AD environments that use Radius for wireless authentication. Special credentials have to be created on the devices with matching accounts on the authentication server in order to bypass the lack of standard end-user sign-on. This becomes a problem when attempts to streamline result in reusing these generic credentials that the end-user normally never sees and associated problems with credential passing initiated at the device-end causing the account to be locked out, all devices using the credential are then locked out.
Unfortunately it's a headache to create thousands of extra credentials and then keep the association 1:1 with devices, so either you have to deal with the problems of the shared device credentials or else you have to be prepared to manage and keep straight thousands of accounts. Basically a lose/lose situation. The Chrome devices and the Windows devices do not have this problem.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Let's be real, most workplaces use Windows/Linux. So kids are better off.
This is not true for scientific research, particularly in the mathematical-based sciences, where Linux/Unix is the de facto standard (although I am sure some do use Windows). However of the past couple of years I have noticed that the number of mac laptops used by students in my lectures has declined enormously to be replaced by a large variety of windows machines.
As I see it the reasons are twofold: price and ability to write on the screen. Students cannot afford the insanely inflated prices for new hardware which is now far from the leading edge. Plus the ability to write on the screen in tablet mode makes it very easy to email mathematical working and diagrams to professors which is really useful for subjects like physics.
Furthermore with the addition of the Linux subsystem for Windows these machines can now run Linux executables without rebooting. The increasing innovation and price/performance advantage of Windows machines has been enough to get me to convert from mac and while I would love to be able to run MacOS on my Dell laptop, I am happier saving $1000 (Canadian) for a better spec of machine and a less desirable but still workable (and improving) OS.
They have long focused on iOS products to the detriment of OS X because that is what happens when you have a typical MBA who chases raw revenues and a designer calling the shots. Numbers and shiny. Jobs never neglected the Mac in a serious way because iOS needs a moat on the PC side. The Surface Studio should have been a ground-shaking, holy fucking shit moment at Apple, but I'd bet $100 it was laughed at rather than taken as the deadly serious portent of things to come for how Microsoft is coming after Apple by leapfrogging them.
If I had a kid going into STEM, I'd buy them an Asus or Alienware laptop with a Linux on it and a Windows VM. If they were undecided, I'd buy them the Chromebook until they declare a major. At no point would I look at Apple's lineup and say "a $1k-$2.5k soldered together toy with an oft neglected Unix OS is the right starting laptop."
Mac osx sever for VM on any base hardware! It can be done apple just needs to give people the licence to do it.
Apple has been ignoring their billions of dollars a year computer business because they are making so much money on their iPhone and app stores. This will serve them badly in the long run--but that is what happens when you have a bean counter as CEO. Witness their recent debacles with the new iPhones without audio jacks and "pro" Macbooks with minimal jacks. Their recent laptops are high end consumer goods mislabeled as "pro"--and this will cost them mindset at the universities over time. I see more inexpensive laptops recently than in the not so distant past--the students don't have the money they did a few years ago, when a student would almost apologize for having a Windows laptop. I have never seen a college student with a Chrome book, but they probably exist. As faculty, I will never buy another Macbook until they put the ports back in--I will never be dependent on a dongle to be able to display sides on AV equipment in the classroom, often old (read HDMI, etc.) As in hell will freeze over first. I have been using Macs for 30 years, but they have poisoned my loyalty with their recent product releases. Fire the current CEO and get somebody who has loyalty to your clients and is interested in meeting their needs Apple! To quote Ludwig Boltzmann, elegance is for tailors. (An adage often repeated by Einstein.) Who would ever make a phone that is thin and fashionable to the point that flexing breaks the board?
Of course it is losing out. No competent IT manager for any facility would go apply because of the very high costs. It's a fashion accessory like Rolex, etc. There are some advantages with Apple in somethings but overall at scale it's an absolutely awful brand for consumers. Some of its advantages come from the smaller userbase.
Even if Apply subsidises in education the people coming out of it need to splash out hugely on Apple and simply wont about it. It's not universally accessible by a long shot and will not represent real world usage. Schools also wont operate in a bubble. The use of Apple can impact surrounding elements.
There should be no place for Windows, Apple, or Google devices in the classroom. Classrooms should be about learning, not brand indoctrination. The point isn't to "get people used to brand X" so they keep buying into that ecosystem as adults.
When I went to school computers were all about open standards and open computing, not locked down vendor lock-in shit.
It's about damn time people figure out that because its shiny and artificially popular its not necessarily better..
Apple value is NOT, quality is NOT, ROI is definitely NOT, unless your business is purely ART. there is no use for an Apple MAC in the enterprise..
beyond that,, Pc's are not trying to emulate MAC's to stay relevant in the environment, its the other way around.. Movign past that, you cannot have a successful MAC in any environment with out a windows device out there to properly support it.. Example what happened to apples X-serve line of servers?
Face it,, Mac's are worthless in a REAL business environment. It's finally caught up with Apple, "the artsy-fartsy i-fone company"
Apple nowadays does not care about the products that attracted many of us to the Apple world, which was reliable computing in an innovative and competitive platform. And forgets technical guys also attract many people, has many come to us asking advice.
I estimate I might have caused directly over the years for Apple to sell around 100 devices, and maybe half of that indirectly. But I digress.
The iPhone is getting a joke, the only argument to buy it nowadays is that is gets so far less malware than Android. The Macbooks pro are outdated, the touch bar is stupid as it gets, or rather cutting one row of keys, and having only USB-C a fransktein.
To add insult to injury, in Europe and in my country, you end up paying around 300-400 dollars more for an iPhone, and 600 hundred more for a Macbook than the equivalent models in the US. So it makes much more sense to buy a surface, and hack it to run Linux. Do not tell me it is the taxes, because MS manages to have the same price of surface here than it has in USA.
I worked with a school's IT as a consultant. The biggest issue is price for one (comparing Chromebooks and iPads) but another big issue is control. Apple for years never bothered with an MDM solution and schools needed to use expensive thriparty solutions. They've just this past year finally put out their own solution but its probably too late. Google with Chromebooks and G Suite/MDM are just a better solution. Google went after that market aggressively and it paid off.
Let's be real, most workplaces use Windows/Linux. So kids are better off.
My son was given an iPad for school this year. Most ridiculous decision ever. No keyboard (unless you buy it yourself), and most anything Apple is locked out anyway in favor of G-suite apps. Anything he uses on it on a daily basis is web. They could have had Chromebooks *designed* to work with Google + web for 1/2 the cost, and had a keyboard and touch pad or mouse to boot.
I caught him putting together a presentation on the iPad and told him to use the computer. The response I got was that they were told to use their iPads.
This is kind of a moot point on the "Google" end of things, considering they just announced they are GIVING UP on the Chromebook-business. And I don't think they have a viable Tablet now...
So, I assume that the Headline is a FUCKING JOKE, like the rest of TFS.
Let's see what those percentages will be like once the Chromebooks fall over, or the OS or Apps stop working because Google has abandoned them, too...
Does Apple manufacture computers? It looks like they are focusing on tablets and phones.
Apple, Microsoft and Google are all walled gardens, just of different flavours.
I don't care unless the educators finally get a real clue and adopt Gnu/Linux for the classroom, but even I know that just isn't going to ever happen because the Apple/MS/Google all have too much money to ever let it.
Mac users expect to pay for good software, but Windows and Linux freeware abounds and schools don't have much money.
apple forces os updates / windows gives you downgrade rights
I worked for Apple from 1995 until 2001 in the K12 division. They abandoned education gradually as soon as the focus became consumer goods like ipods.
Also, they ignored competitive advantages they had by not leveraging the Apple Share IP servers which could serve windows clients as well. They made the tech- and never pushed it. At the time it was apparent to me they were pulling out. It was also apparent with the Darwin kernel and the tools taken from NeXT that they had an ready to go enterprise solution in Server 10.
15 years later.... it's apparent they have pulled out of computers in general. It's sad too. When I pull out my alpha disks of OSX it's apparent that a revolution was lost. I can still load the alpha/pre-alpha OSX on present day Intel hardware. Go figure.
It's debatable as to whether they made the right decision or not- could they make a bundle in the enterprise? But to the engineers that worked there at the time paradise was indeed lost.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
subject really says it all.
Unix is king in some scientific domains.
There you'll see a *lot* of Linux workstations, and quite a few linux laptops
(with the remaining being mostly Mac OS X laptops - also a variant of Unix, but at least the OS-and-hardware integration is done by one single company, removing a few headache of "how do I install Linux on this weird hardware ?")
Most popular distros here around seems to be :
- Redhat / Fedora (because "enterprise") mostly on the workstations.
- Ubuntu (because ultra-popular) mostly on the laptops
- Mint for the "I don't want to be an Ubuntu sheep" crowd, specially those who vocally criticize Ubuntu.
- Suse (for the people who actually want to be a real alternative to the Redhat and Ubuntu users, for the people who appreciate Suse stellar hardware support, for the people who appreciate Tumbleweed being a serious rolling distro made accessible for the non hard-core geek).
- Gentoo (yup ! real people using gentoo in a production environment) for the hardcore geeks.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Chrome has to be one of the most worthless "books" that was ever conceived, to make our kids "learn" on these, is a slap in the face to technology. They cannot learn anything about coding, or computing with these devices, They can only learn what "schools" allow them to learn. Which is a huge problem, I mean if the kids want to learn something LET THEM LEARN IT, that's what schools should be for... NOT to tell the kids what they can and cannot learn. As far as APPLE being in schools, The results listed above would be much worse. Apple removed their Ethernet ports from ALL of their devices, to save money? Because we all know it wasn't due to the fact that they are NEEDED when setting up a wireless device. Apple is one of the most over rated bloat ware name brand products. ( we all know those "name brand" products that kids will be teased if they do not have one).. With Apple, Apple is in control of what the users of the apple products can and can't do, ( apple still believes they own all rights to the phone, and you pay to "use it". ) Sorry APPLE, when I buy a phone, I get access to EVERYTHING about it, NOT just what you want me to have access to. Its mine, I paid real money for it, I can do with it as I wish... If that's taking it apart so I can replace my own battery, or downloading the shaken baby app. Its MY DEVICE, NOT THEIRS...
It's time to say no to crapple.
Students and tax-payers losing out to corporate profits?
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Instead of giant licensing deals and flashy hardware, they bulk buy an education board... like a pi, and have the computer lab teach a class of kids how to set em up for use in the classrooms? Why is this such a tough concept? Teach the kids to help teach the kids teaching kids! Damn board is DESIGNED for this sort of thing, and at 35 bucks, its a steal.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
home.. Gotcha!!
At an even more basic level Apple missed the boat. We order computers in lots of 500 or 1000. These eMacs - they do not stack well. Regular Dell desktops made of metal - you can stack these right up to the ceiling. Good luck trying to find someone willing to learn how to swap logic boards in a MacBook. Apple service parts are expensive. Just had to buy a MacBook top case $170.00 - Chromebook part? $50.00 and one Phillips screwdriver - none of those tri-lobe jobs. Can't stack Apples; too difficult/expensive to repair. Apple has not been thinking of us education tech support people in a very long time. What IT manager wants to have to put-up with whiney staff because Macs were purchased? But, Apple Remote Desktop is fantastic - lightyears better than Crosstec for computer lab management. Still I would rather repair 50 Chromebooks than 1 screen-cracked iPad.
Apple lost me forever in high school when I moved to a new town and my school had iMac's (the ugly fluorescent single unit ones).
They crashed all the fucking time. Had to do all pascal work on paper because it would hard lockup in the middle of work. Slow as shit. When I inquired how the fuck the school district blew millions on this cluster fuck, I was told someone was later caught taking kickbacks to win contracts.
the less apple products around the better.
To be fair - Chromebooks have to be purchased with a management license - only certain vendors even let you do that. iPad's can be managed from the get-go using device enrollment program - then tie them in with your existing mdm.