Apple Announces New $299 iPad With Pencil Support For Schools (theverge.com)

At its education event in Chicago today, Apple introduced a refreshed 9.7-inch iPad with Apple Pencil support. "The updated iPad will be available in Apple stores today, in silver, space gray, and a new gold finish," reports The Verge. "The tablet will include Touch ID, an HD FaceTime camera, 10 hours of battery life, an 8-megapixel rear camera, LTE option, and Apple's A10 Fusion chip." From the report: Apple previously lowered the price of its 9.7-inch iPad last year, with a base model starting at $329, but today it's going a step further for students. Apple is offering the new iPad to schools priced at $299 and to consumers for $329. The optional Apple Pencil will be priced at $89 for schools and the regular $99 price for consumers. This is obviously not the $259 budget iPad pricing that was rumored, but it does make it a little more affordable to students and teachers. This new iPad will be a key addition to Apple's lineup as it seeks to fight back against Google's Chromebooks. Apple's iPads and Mac laptops reigned supreme in U.S. classrooms only five years ago, accounting for half of all mobile devices shipped to schools in 2013. Apple has now slipped behind both Google and Microsoft in U.S. schools, and Chromebooks are dominating classrooms with nearly 60 percent of shipments in the U.S. Apple had some other non-hardware, education-themed announcements at its event today. "Apple demonstrated Smart Annotation, which allows teachers to mark up reports in Pages directly, and the company promised new versions of its iWork apps like Pages, Numbers, and Keynote that support the Apple Pencil," reports The Verge. "Teachers will also be able to use Macs to create digital books for their classrooms, and Apple is building a books creator into the Pages app." The company also announced a new augmented reality app called Froggipedia that lets students virtually dissect frogs using an Apple Pencil. The free iCloud offering for students has also been bumped up from 5GB to 200GB.

Comments

Pencil

[Anonymous Coward]

$89 for the Apple Pencil? If a student uses it, how easy is this thing to lose?

Re: Pencil

[b0s0z0ku]

I lost pencils and pens all the time. Textbooks, not so much. Even if the book came back with a few more scratches, it was still usable by the next student.

Re: Pencil

[b0s0z0ku]

No, I lost them because they were thin, my backpack often had holes, and they fell out. And they didn't make an audible "thump" when they fell out. Honestly, I wouldn't have been able to afford it, I'd have figured out how to "borrow" one from a rich/preppy student who bullied me :)

Re: Pencil

[pnutjam]

No, a pencil is much easer to lose and more likely to stop working or be damaged.

Re:Pencil

[Anonymous Coward]

This is where Apple's problem lies. I was reading an article about the new ChromeOS tablet from Acer they announced yesterday, and while it may not be as nice a piece of hardware, they said something about the stylus being available to schools in bulk for reasonable cost.

So long as the iPad requires a $90 stylus, they won't make any serious inroads in education.

Re:Pencil

[mspohr]

Logitech has one for $49 for the iPad... also keyboard and case.
https://www.macrumors.com/2018...

Re:Pencil

[PolygamousRanchKid]

If a student uses it, how easy is this thing to lose?

. . . or get stolen.

Apple is going the printer cartridge and razor blade route on this one. They won't make any money on the pads, but will make a killing selling the replacement pencils . . . which seem to go M.I.A. regularly.

Re:Pencil

[Paradise Pete]

So long as the iPad requires a $90 stylus

It's not required at all. Fingers will work just fine. They've just added support for it.

Re:Pencil

[rtb61]

Fingers on a keyboard and mouse work fine, tapping on a screen is stupidly slow. Going to give children computers in school, then they had better be creating lots of content on those computers ie notebooks with keyboards and trackpads, else you will just grind out empty consumers of content. It might feed Apple's bottom line but they know better and are very corrupt for pushing content consuming tablets rather than content creating notebooks. Students using computers should produce more content not less.

Little late there, Apple

[Locke2005]

My daughter's school already switched from having a few iPads to issuing literally every student in the school their own Chromebook. Google's web-based office tools are okay, and probably the only option on something with only 32G of memory.

Re:Little late there, Apple

[DontBeAMoran]

32GB of memory? Holy cow, that's four times the RAM in my gaming PC!

Oh, you meant 32GB of storage.

What happened to Slashdot? I thought this was a website for nerds.

Re:Little late there, Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

What happened to Slashdot? I thought this was a website for nerds.

He was born in 2005. Have you seen the "what's a computer" commercial? He is the goblin child.

Re:Little late there, Apple

[Mr D from 63]

The tablet form factor is not as useful in education as the notebook form factor.

My kids schools use Chromebooks and they are used all the time. Kids need to be able type up reports, do research, move files, etc. No tablet is good for that. Keyboard and mouse/mouspad are the right tools for that job.

IPads make great PR though.

Re:Little late there, Apple

[sjbe]

What happened to Slashdot? I thought this was a website for nerds.

FAR too many of them have left. Slashdot doesn't have much geek cred left.

Re:Little late there, Apple

[DontBeAMoran]

People can have gaming PCs that are not expensive nor cutting edge. Not everyone plays the shiny crap games with no actual content.

Re:Little late there, Apple

[rogoshen1]

you know, just because a game is shiny, doesn't mean it's devoid of content.

(Looking at you Witcher 3)

But, why limit yourself? especially since RAM is so cheap these days, and a good video card remains relevant for about 4 years.

Re:Little late there, Apple

[DRJlaw]

32GB of memory? Holy cow, that's four times the RAM in my gaming PC!

Oh, you meant 32GB of storage.

What happened to Slashdot? I thought this was a website for nerds.

Yeah, nerds who remember that memory is not limited to dynamic random access memory, but includes storage technologies like bubble memory. I mean, it's cute that you've recognized the distinction between immediate use memory and secondary storage, but us oldsters remember that "memory" used to be really weird and the flash storage of today is far better than the memory of old.

God help you if iOS is ever changed to support optane-like technologies. Your head may explode.

Re:Little late there, Apple

[DontBeAMoran]

Quad-core i5, 8GB RAM, GTX650. It's adequate for the games I play.

Re: Little late there, Apple

[Brockmire]

Wtf? RAM is expensive. I was buying 32GB DDR3 kits for $90-110 years ago when RAM industry fucked itself. The current price for DDR4 is high and will come down later this year. Not that low, but lower than now.

Re:Little late there, Apple

[geek]

I took all the geek cred

Re:Little late there, Apple

[Joce640k]

My pita never complained about pieces of dead sheep being inserted.

Re:Little late there, Apple

[Locke2005]

I'm old enough to remember when the only memory was magnetic cores threaded on wires... which was non-volatile, by the way.

Re:Little late there, Apple

[inking]

I very much disagree. When I was in high school, my backpack was stuffed with 300+ page thick paper books literally every single day. Maths, chemistry, biology. Those books have done irreparable damage to my back that I am making up for by staying healthy now, but will probably suffer from nonetheless once I get older.

Working through a book on a laptop sucks. There are no two ways about it. An iPad coupled with something like LiquidText for reading and annotating and Notability for notes is godsend. This far outweighs the fact that the keyboard is a separate device and that moving files is a little different than it is on desktops.

I think the biggest disadvantage is that you do get accustomed to this tablet way of doing things, which means that students wouldn’t be all that great with desktops once they do need them.

Less than 10% discount???

[Anonymous Coward]

Less than 10% discount??? For other brands that wouldn't even register as a mention, never mind a headline!
And a $89 stylus... Nice...

Re:Less than 10% discount???

[supremebob]

Apple has always offered a 10% education discount on most of their hardware. I'm not sure why they are trying to hype this up like it's something new.

iCloud Storage

[SeaFox]

The free iCloud offering for students has also been bumped up from 5GB to 200GB.

How about you get with the times and give that to everyone, Apple?

Re:iCloud Storage

[torkus]

lol seriously

5GB is small enough to active discourage people from using it to back up their media vs other services that don't even lock you in but give you far more (or unlimited) free storage.

Besides that, a $90 stylus that (unless apple forgot to announce it) has no way to attach to the ipad is overpriced and far too easily lost. How well do they really think that will go over? Once again, they ensure no one will use it.

That's not even taking into account the fact that it's almost 1/3 of the cost for the iPad itself!! They're (badly) trying to pad the margin with another crappy accessory. Instead, a chromebook with an actual keyboard...yep.

Re:iCloud Storage

[pnutjam]

My kids school uses Ipads, so this is interesting to me. Although their icloud account was 25GB, which fills up from one backup. I was looking at using this to back them up when they turn them in this year. We rent them from the school.

My biggest complaint is that we have to lie about our kids ages. You can't create a child account without an existing apple product to manage from, there is no ability to manage from a website.
The school 'could' create child accounts, but they won't participate in the program for some reason. I spent a good two months trying to figure out why and complaining about the necessity to create a 13+ year old account for my six year old.

Re: iCloud Storage

[Brockmire]

You didn't catch any of the recent articles on how Apple is bad at backend and scaling stuff?

Re:iCloud Storage

[RazorSharp]

The free iCloud offering for students has also been bumped up from 5GB to 200GB.

How about you get with the times and give that to everyone, Apple?

The upgrade is fairly cheap.

Re:iCloud Storage

[Waccoon]

Once again, they ensure no one will use it.

Unless the school requires it.

Even 20 years ago when I was in college, it was mandatory that we buy Apple computers for the school offices. The school would not allow us to buy anything else. I hated being responsible for ordering new computers for the campus newspaper office, since everyone hated them, but school policy is still policy.

Very Easy to Lose

[Roger W Moore]

If it is like the current models then it has no means of attachment to the iPad when not in use.

To quote someone famous

[Lucas123]

"If you see a stylus, they blew it.” - Steve Jobs, 2010

Re:To quote someone famous

[supernova87a]

Yeah, I think he meant if the primary UI requires a stylus then it sucks. This, supposedly, is turning an iPad into a *more* useful drawing, editing tool.

Re:To quote someone famous

[RazorSharp]

"If you see a stylus, they blew it.” - Steve Jobs, 2010

Jobs also didn't have any problem contradicting himself. If I remember correctly, he disparaged the whole idea of a tablet in the years leading up to the iPad's release. For years he was hypercritical of two-button mice, even though Mac OS supported right-click functions and eventually Apple released their own version of a two-button mouse. x86 was supposedly the antiquated, no-good cheap option until it wasn't.

I think the opinions of Steve Jobs were always relative to the exact time he expressed them. His opinion one day had no bearing on his opinion the next day. Touch screen technology has changed quite a bit since he made that statement, making the utility of a stylus today much different than it was in 2010.

Also, Jobs's opinions depended on what products Apple had on the market that day.

#2 Pencil support

[jfdavis668]

Comes with a built in sharpener.

Vendor lock-in

[fred6666]

Schools should not invest in an eco system with a single vendor for both hardware and software while there are more open alternatives. This is especially true for public schools, which shouldn't be allowed to enter such a high level of vendor lock-in.

What more Apple stuff will need to be purchased?

[Streetlight]

Does this mean every teacher will need a school purchased $2,000 to $3,000 iMac computer with specialized software to interface to these new iPads? Will the schools also need additional school system purchased Apple specific centralized server hardware and software for all these iPads to do their job? There could be additional overhead I haven't thought of.

ClassKit API

[atomicalgebra]

Apple also announced ClassKit api in order to integrate educational software into schools.

Re:What more Apple stuff will need to be purchased

[b0s0z0ku]

No, how about a $500 Mac Mini? :)

And while the pen technology is interesting...

[magusxxx]

...there still being no update to their 2014 Mac Mini is not. *grumble*

Re:And while the pen technology is interesting...

[DontBeAMoran]

Surely you meant there's still no update to the 2012 Mac mini, because 2014 was a downgrade.

Re:And while the pen technology is interesting...

[magusxxx]

Agreed. BTW...typing this on my 2012 Mac Mini. :D

Re:And while the pen technology is interesting...

[DontBeAMoran]

Your 2012 is still way faster than my 2010.

At least I was able to upgrade it to 16GB RAM a few years later, unlike the new models.

Why Apple Pencil sucks

[sjbe]

Besides that, a $90 stylus that (unless apple forgot to announce it) has no way to attach to the ipad is overpriced and far too easily lost. How well do they really think that will go over? Once again, they ensure no one will use it.

Yeah I have several problems it the Apple Pencil.
1) Round so it easily rolls off tables if you set it down. They made it pretty instead of functional.
2) The iPad isn't designed with a place to store it when not in use rendering it clumsy to transport
3) Unless you are a fairly specific kind of artist (I'm not) the app support SUCKS. I'm an engineer and I can conceive of lots of uses for something like this but Apple isn't making it easy.
4) Far too expensive for something that is easy to loose and can't be stored easily
5) Did I mention the apps SUCK. Even for note taking which should be the most obvious thing in the world.

I also have beef with the iPads for similar reasons
1) Why are the icons stored in the same spacing as on an iPhone with WAY too much space in between
2) The apps are either redundant to my iPhone or SUCK for anything more useful like taking notes or doing engineering.
3) The cases are annoying and by and large suck. I really don't like the most common cases and Apple clearly thinks of cases and keyboards as an afterthought at best.

I'd love to get something like an iPad but they simply haven't bothered to work on anything that is a viable use case for me. They just supersized my iPhone and didn't really bother to take advantage of the larger form factor in any serious way.

Re:Why Apple Pencil sucks

[jdavidb]

For a little more than the price of two Apple pencil styluses, I can get two Amazon Fire tablets, which would be so much more useful for me and my family.

Easier said than done

[sjbe]

Schools should not invest in an eco system with a single vendor for both hardware and software while there are more open alternatives.

You mean like Microsoft + Intel? In principle I agree with you but good luck getting a practical setup without a substantial amount of vendor lock in.

Re:Easier said than done

[fred6666]

I agree it's hard, but it doesn't mean they should pick the absolute worst. Apple is the top in vendor lock-in.
Either Windows PCs or chromebooks are a lot less locked-in since you can always purchase hardware from another manufacturer while keeping the same OS. Any school manager deciding to buy Apple products should be fired.
Ideally, schools should also favor the purchasing of applications which are cross platform. So an iOS only application should be banned.

If you want to vendor lock-in yourself or your family go for it. You'll have only yourself to blame if you are unable to switch away from Apple in a few years if you don't like their new products or the price increases. But schools should not force that vendor lock-in to students, and not use tax payer's money to dig a vendor lock-in hole.

Re:Easier said than done

[fred6666]

Most chromebook apps work on Google Chrome web browser on any platform (not just Google OS), and some even work in other browsers.

Re:Easier said than done

[RazorSharp]

Schools should not invest in an eco system with a single vendor for both hardware and software while there are more open alternatives.

You mean like Microsoft + Intel? In principle I agree with you but good luck getting a practical setup without a substantial amount of vendor lock in.

It's possible, but it would require federal $$$ to make it happen.

Re:Easier said than done

[inking]

That’s funny, I switched from Android to WP to iOS just. Before that I switched from Windows to Linux and back just fine too. Must be some really terrible lock-in you have there if it’s causing you that much trouble.

Re:Easier said than done

[fred6666]

switching for a single user is much easier than for an organization. Also you may not have locked-in yourself too badly if you didn't purchase apps and tons of accessories. However you are now on iOS so let me know when you successfully switch back to something else.
Hint: don't use any of the Apple services (mail/calendar/music/photos)

Re:Easier said than done

[inking]

AFAIK, most schools don’t really on the Apple’s backend. It’s not very good.

Yea no

[eclectro]

Whatever happened to regular pencils and paper and having a computer lab for students? As a taxpayer do I really need outfit the marxists in training with every electronic gadget there is??

Guess what, you can do math without an ipad using just a pencil, paper, and maybe a $15 calculator. For wordprocessing, that's what a computer lab is for.

Re: Yea no

[Brockmire]

I was very depressed when my 13 year old nephew didn't know what handwriting looked like. "What language is that?" "Fuck man, that IS English".

When a stylus is useful

[sjbe]

"If you see a stylus, they blew it.” - Steve Jobs, 2010

Yeah he said it. But the reality is that a stylus is fine PROVIDED it isn't used like a mouse. A stylus should be used for drawing only. And drawing letters for note taking falls into that category. Just drawing because that is all it is good for. If you couldn't do it with a real pencil then you shouldn't be able to do it with a stylus as a general proposition. The problem with them tends to be that application developers easily forget this and get tempted into using a stylus like a mouse (or worse a keyboard) and that NEVER works well.

A stylus can be hugely useful on a computer. I'd LOVE something that could be useful for taking notes and annotating documents digitally. But so far that corner of the market has been ignored and Apple is chasing a tiny group of artists and designers instead of the huge market for students and professionals.

No

[Comboman]

No, kids loose pencils because they are very small in two of their three dimensions, meaning they can slip through a tiny hole in a pocket or backpack or even pencil-case (the thing specifically designed to store them). To make matters worse, they are also round (a design flaw Apple could have fixed but didn't) so that when they are inevitably dropped, they will roll away and roll under things or into cracks between things or down more holes.

Neither

[Comboman]

Neither, they're going to spend the money buying assault rifles and weapons training for teachers. Because there's no way that could go wrong.

Now if they would fix their parental restrictictio

[e3m4n]

Unfortunately Apple is still way behind the ball on the granular parental restrictions that Android offers if they want to compete. The exact same parental nanny application, FamilyTime.io, on an Android, not only lets me set schedules for when my child can use their applications, but it will let me specify exactly WHICH apps they are allowed to use and which ones they are not during those schedules. On IOS my options include : Safari, Camera, Siri Dictation, iTunes Store, in-app purchases, and ---> ALL OTHER APPS. This means that if my child needs access to lets say the 'Remind' app, during school hours, I also have to give the child access to text messaging, skype, games, and another other stupid shit they happen to have just because the teachers heavily use 'Infinite Campus', and 'Remind' for academia. Whereas the _exact_same_ utility on Android lets me literally say yes/no to every installed app on the device. Many comunication with the developer indicate the fault lies DIRECTLY with APPLE.

My 99 cent pad

[rsilvergun]

has had full pencil support for decades. Maybe longer. Anyone know when they pencil was invented?

a $300 dollar boondoggle, fantastic.

[rogoshen1]

in the days of budget cuts and atrocious test scores; i'm really really glad apple is still able to get people to think their technology in the classroom is anything beyond a mixture of corporate welfare and advertising.

The line of thought seems to be "STEM STEM STEM! if we get the kids using technology they'll be the next generation of tech gods!"

But really, these are just tablets. And certainly don't represent much of an improvement over books, pencil, and paper. When it comes to you know, learning.

Which is what they should be focusing on. Drop the common core bullshit, stop teaching to standardized tests, and let kids fail from time to time.

The kids aren't creating a damn thing -- just being trained to consume content.

What a strange world...

[TimMD909]

The world has changed. Apple is now trying to do what Microsoft did 20 years ago. Unfortunately for Apple, you can't get the next generation hooked on your goods if they're not good enough and not the right price. Add in issues getting affordable software into their damned walled garden, and I'm completely confused as to why Apple would even go down this road.

Maybe all the C* levels doing Himalayan amounts of cocaine while their engineers routinely micro-dose on acid is the explanation...

From what I'm seeing, the price is still 2x-3x too high for giving to kids. Kids break shit all the time. Unless the iPads are completely indestructible, $300 will quickly turn into $900 after the inevitable third time the kid drops it from a height of only 0.5 meters. A better price point is $100-$150 in which the Chromebooks dominate.

And as others have said here, tablets aren't that useful for anything more than casual use (like reading an ebook, watching YouTube while taking a shit, and shit-posting on your favorite social media). If you want your kid to actually be doing research, writing up papers, and doing homework, tablets are not the device to use.

LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

This is supposed to be apples Chromebook-killer?
What a half ass attempt.

More trouble for Android

[guacamole]

So Apple almost owns the entire space for tablets costing 300USD or more. Amazon sells very very cheap tablets for 50-150USD. Within these tight brackets there exists very little room for Android tablets to exist and strive. If you look at what Samsung offers for the 200-300, it's only the ancient Tab A products.

Re:Apple has shown it's never too late...

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm sure the Chromebooks are fine, but they wouldn't be as useful to students as an iPad with a Pencil, and I'm pretty sure not as durable."

Right on the first, wrong on the second, and on the third, the chromebooks are much cheaper than the cheapest tablet and trivially replaceable. When you forget your chromebook, someone can hand you another and -- boom -- you're back in business.

Chromebooks are way easier to adminster en mass, and so cost less for labor.

iPads are a phenomenally bad choice for schools compared to chromebooks.

GOOD!

[Anonymous Coward]

Mediocre tools? GOOD! Why in God's name would you spend time teaching kids to use complex word processors? You're supposed to be teaching them to WRITE, not use whistles and bells which will change on every release.

Yea ... but

[waspleg]

Google has been caught repeatedly spying on kids. and no one gives a fuck because they're cheap. Privacy was never even an issue which came up. I work in K-12. Cheap > * It's fucking sad to see kids with such limited locked in walled garden devices and not real computers, especially the federal free lunch crowd we serve (i.e. poor as fuck). They're extremely limited (even more so because Enterprise enrolled) and they don't even know it.

We're paying ~$235 per HP G4 Chromebook, having said that there are schools in my district whose principals like their Kool-Aid Apple flavored and they will spend anything to look cool.

At least in Education, technology is a fashion. Right now Google is in style.

Re:Yea ... but

[waspleg]

At least for me, the primary reason I work in IT is because my elementary school was an IBM guinea pig and I was given a PS/2 which was in my bedroom at home.

When I was supposed to be asleep I was figuring out how to load games from a command line. I was one of maybe 2 kids in the entire grade who could actually get "online" (Prodigy) because I figured it out myself. I was 9.

Thirty years later all they're given are web browsers as operating systems which spy on everything you do or tablet toys (iPads). Even our virtual machine labs were better than this, at least they had an OS someone could look at it if so inclined and could run custom software some of which for creative purposes such as autocad/adobe suite/blender, etc.

But no one cares, these are cheaper, they're locked the fuck down - you can do nothing at all that isn't explicitly allowed. Why? Mostly because their REAL primary uses are as babysitters and testing consoles not learning.

What we have don't even support Android applications so it's limited to the Chrome OS "Store" which has about much useful shit in it as your average Windows phone.

Re:Yea ... but

[waspleg]

I literally am that support. It's not as expensive as all the outsourcing and bonuses to the top. Our district has annual budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars and waste plenty on spurious bullshit like new furniture for managers.

We've outsourced our help desk which has a quarter of the skill at 3 times the price. The same for FMLA "management", vehicle repairs, transportation, and other departments which are constantly under the gun in this privatize everything race to the bottom loot everything for corporate cronies "I got mines" and fuck the public good culture. Betsy DeVos love us (no joke). I hope your district is better.

kids break things

[xeoron]

Chromebooks are easy to repair, while ipads are not!

inroads in education where is loans and the schoo

[Joe_Dragon]

inroads in education where is loans and the school can force you to buy them just like with text books.

does apple have an rackmount server or vm rights

[Joe_Dragon]

does apple have an rack mount server or vm rights on non apple hardware for local MGT servers? or even local storage servers?

Re:What more Apple stuff will need to be purchased

[Joe_Dragon]

with 2014 hardware at 2014 pricing.

well cps should get them free and the union will g

[Joe_Dragon]

well cps should get them free and the union will get up pensions to pay for any thing.

Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been how long since the Apple Pencil was introduced and they are just now getting around to adding support for it into their first party office suite? Not when the Apple Pencil was first released, not with iOS 11 which added drawing support across a lot of apps... they wait until NOW to do it. It's like they were trying to drive people to get Office 365 subscriptions so they can get Word/Excel/PowerPoint for iOS.

Re: Apple has shown it's never too late...

[Brockmire]

Durable? When did this happen? I hear of Apple shit breaking for looking at it the wrong way all the time.

Re: Strict education

[Brockmire]

I think that's a dig at the lack of external storage and the hassle of getting content onto an iPad that is a basic fucking download for anyone else.

Not wrong on the second

[SuperKendall]

It's absurd to claim the Chromebooks are more useful. when you can just run Chrome to do anything on an iPad you could on the Chromoebook - but then you ALSO have tens of thousands of educational apps that are iPad only, and you ALSO have a pressure sensitive stylus for the screen which the Chromebook has nothing like.

If you want to raise a classroom of people who do nothing but browse the web, I'm sure the Chromebook is fine. If you actually want educated children that are well-rounded, the iPad is superior.

the chromebooks are much cheaper than the cheapest tablet

New iPads are $400 with the Logitech rugged keyboard case and pencil. Looks like that gets you about 2.2 decent Chromebooks - replace more than two and you would have been better off with the iPad. The iPad will also last longer component wise as the cheaper Chromebooks will have soldering eventually fail, screens dying, etc.

It's the software, not the cost

[sjbe]

For a little more than the price of two Apple pencil styluses, I can get two Amazon Fire tablets, which would be so much more useful for me and my family.

If that is your use case then no argument. I'm not so concerned with the price but rather the fact that you just can't frakin' do anything genuinely useful with an Apple Pencil. I'm an engineer, an accountant, and I coach a sports team. Every one of those jobs has a LOT of paperwork that I could easily see doing on an iPad with an Apple Pencil but Apple in their infinite wisdom cannot be bothered to write the software to allow me to do it. They are worried about the three people doing graphics design rather than the millions who take notes and annotate and share documents. If Apple really was chasing the next big thing, it's right there. They just have to write the software to make it happen.

If Apple would write that software it would be VASTLY more valuable than any number of Amazon Fire tablets. I would happily hand them a pile of money to solve the problem of good digital note taking and document sharing. Sadly Microsoft actually seems to be closer with their Surface products though they haven't really nailed it either because they are thinking about it as an operating system expansion rather than from a document process standpoint.