Microsoft Unveils Windows 10 S Laptops Starting at $189 and New Office 365 Tools for Students (venturebeat.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft today unveiled new Windows 10 S devices from Lenovo and JP, starting at $189, aimed at the education market. The company also announced new Office 365 learning tools for students. The news mirrors Microsoft's firstline workers push in September, which saw new Windows 10 S devices starting at $275. The company is now simply doing the same as part of its latest EDU push, and it's not mincing words when it comes to explaining its target audience: "schools who don't want to compromise on Chromebooks."

Microsoft unveiled four new Windows 10 devices that are all supposed to offer more than Chrome OS. Two are standard laptops: the Lenovo 100e powered by Intel Celeron Apollo Lake for $189 and JP's Classmate Leap T303 with Windows Hello for $199. The other two are 2-in-1s: the Lenovo 300e convertible with pen support for $279 and the Trigono V401 with pen and touch for $299. All four are spill resistant, ruggedized for students, and promise long battery life to avoid having wires all over the classroom.

Comments

Double edged sword

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

It looks like a good plan on paper. Give away the tools dirt cheap to students, when they graduate and take up jobs they would demand professional versions of the tools at work place, market share, brand ambassadors, etc etc, yada yada yada. That is why Ansys would give away its flagship crown jewel product for dirt cheap prices to the universities, with some throttling no doubt. The idea is, these kids will some day be managers who were familiar with Ansys.

But in the case of Microsoft, in this particular project, it has great potential to backfire. Kids are used to powerful machines, gaming machines, either they own it or they have friends who do. Even the public library machines are usually more powerful. They might see the 189$ cheap machine to be too slow and blame Microsoft instead of the low horsepower hardware.

And Lenovo, HP etc load the PC with deadly levels of crap ware and nagware. And Microsoft adds its own bunch to the mix, and it does not test them at low end hardware. I know it personally. I bought a desktop as my "bill paying computer". Exclusively to log in to banks, brokerages and credit cards. Never use any other machine to log into sensitive account and never use that machine for anything else. So, naturally, I picked a low end AMD desktop. Oh. my. god. Is it slow! or what!! Something called superfetch would keep thrashing the disk. Or onedrive service. Or some disk indexer. Or some telemetry. Hunted and killed every one of these processes, and it is still slow. 12 GB, four processor machine takes forever to open Quicken.

One taste like this, and the kids will actively hate microsoft and will go out of their way to avoid microsoft products when they become managers.