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

Start early

[QuietLagoon]

Gotta start that tracking and data collection as early as possible.

Re:Start early

[avandesande]

Yes evil microsoft... all my kids school stuff is done on Google Docs. So much better!

Re:Start early

[Voyager529]

Gotta start that tracking and data collection as early as possible.

I know the Microsoft haterade is abundant in these parts, but at this point, MS is playing catch-up. Apple had a hold in the educational markets in the late 80s and early 90's, then MS ate their lunch with virtually free licensing for schools with commodity hardware. Now, Google is all educationally trendy since they give away G-Suite Apps for Business or whatever the hell they call it, and a palette of Chromebooks are a whole lot cheaper than a palette of Optiplex workstations with the added bonus of being far simpler to lock down manage than Windows. Schools have been tripping over themselves to migrate to the Google ecosystem.

This leaves us with the same quandary we had when Microsoft owned the education market: why are we teaching products rather than principles? Students should be learning E-mail, not Gmail or Outlook. They should be learning Word Processing, not Word or GDocs. Basic HTML coding wouldn't be the worst thing either, especially since the basics can be taught for $0 in any text editor...but I digress.

The real issue is that no matter who is in the classroom, the lesson being taught at this point is "okayness with analytics", and "okayness with lockdown". It's safe in the walled garden, and whether it's Apple's, Google's, or Microsoft's, it is this lesson that worries me the most.

Re:Start early

[sensei moreh]

... why are we teaching products rather than principles?

Some things never change. Back in the day, the appropriate follow-on was, "They should be learning Word Processing, not WordStar or WordPerfect.

Been through it already

[mykepredko]

I have a couple of Acer Win10 systems with a similar amount of DDR/SSD as these systems and they don't take well to any apps other than Office and performance, in terms of waiting for a window to come up, is abysmal (it's actually a lot worse with Office360).

The systems have 4GB DDR and 32GB SSD - with Office the SSD is filled to around 19GB

Maybe Win10s running on Apollo Lake has better performance but I would view any systems with a jaundiced eye until I had a chance to test them out.

Re:Razors & Blades business model

[gfxguy]

Switch to a replaceable blade straight edge.... I paid $6.99 for a 120 pack of replacement blades.

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.

You mean, doing exactly same thing as Chromebooks?

[iamacat]

Chromebooks have Play Store (and sideloading APKs/Linux with some hackery irrelevant to an average user). These laptops have Microsoft Store, not sure about developer sideloads. Seems up to which app/game selection you prefer?

The example physics test... seriously?

[scatbomb]

Did anyone see the example test questions in the office 365 demo screenshot? Are physics tests really like that now? If this is representative of how low academic standards are... we're screwed. Every single answer (except the 1st I guess) is completely wrong yet 5/6? Are you joking?