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Apple To Unveil a Cheaper iPad Next Week At Its Educational Event
Apple is holding an education-focused event on Tuesday where it's expected to launch a "low-cost iPad" alongside new education software. The goal is to win back students and teachers who have adopted similar products/services from rivals Google and Microsoft. Bloomberg reports: In its first major product event of the year, Apple will return to its roots in the education market. The event on Tuesday at Lane Technical College Prep High School in Chicago will mark the first time Apple has held a product launch geared toward education since 2012 when it unveiled a tool for designing e-books for the iPad. It's also a rare occasion for an Apple confab outside its home state of California. In Chicago, the world's most-valuable technology company plans to show off a new version of its cheapest iPad that should appeal to the education market, said people familiar with the matter. The company will also showcase new software for the classroom, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private plans. Apple declined to comment.
The surprising thing about Apple isn't their relative unwillingness to cut prices; that's what left them reaping most of the profit in laptops and mobile devices and something will really have to scare them to get them to try to compete on price with random plasticky Chromebooks. The surprising thing is how unconcerned they seem to be by the fact that managing the damn things is miserable, labor intensive, and relatively costly.
For device management, iOS MDM is somewhat less dismal than Android MDM(fewer OS versions; no vendor specific 'does this depend on Samsung Knox?' nonsense); but for account management Apple IDs have stubbornly remained close to their roots as something that individuals set up, for themselves and by themselves; and iOS devices remain close to their roots as either single-user devices or single-app kiosk widgets. They have slowly made incremental concessions to management over time; but mostly in a direction that suggests that BYOD is the preferred use case; which is very, very, not interchangeable with 'organization owned and operated'.
Managing a whole bunch of Google Apps (for business or for education, architecturally pretty much the same thing) is downright trivial by comparison; either through their interface or with AD synchronization if you are doing an implementation alongside some amount of Windows infrastructure. It is...not impressive...that Google plays better with Microsoft's directory infrastructure than iOS plays with OSX's(to the degree that that even exists anymore, with OSX 'server' being allowed to bleed out in a corner somewhere).
That's just a matter of software, not hardware capabilities. That being said...
If you're attaching a keyboard and mouse to a tablet, aren't you pretty much acknowledging that what you really need is a laptop and not a tablet? We've seen several well-publicized, failed attempts at merging mouse and touch paradigms. I'm not sure why you have such faith that Apple could pull this off where everyone else so far has failed miserably.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.