Under Pressure, Apple Lowers iPad Cost For Schools

Apple’s vice president of product marketing, Greg Joswiak, added that the iPad is a “magical sheet of glass that can be anything we want it to be”. Or at least cheaper ones. Some Chromebooks and Windows laptops cost less than $200. What’s at stake is the tech loyalty of the next generation.

Apple announced a brand new iPad Tuesday at its first media event of the year, at Chicago’s Lane Tech High School.

The introduction of the iPad Pro and cost reductions for the basic iPad have helped Apple’s sales, but it’s clear that the iPad hasn’t been the world-changing device that the smartphone was.

Of course, iPads aren’t only popular with students. In the past, only upgraded iPads had stylus functionality.

Google’s cloud-based Chrome operating system at the core of cheap Chromebooks captured a 59.6% market share in K-12 mobile computing US shipments during the fourth quarter of 2017, according to Futuresource Consulting, with many of those models in the sub-$300 ballpark.

This year, big questions linger.

“We are a Google board … and most of the province is, but it’s the seamlessness (of the iPad) that I like”, Gillian Madeley, a teacher-librarian and technology lead for the York Region District School Board in Ontario, said.

For schools, Apple’s challenge is convincing teachers and parents that a device that doesn’t come standard with a keyboard is as good for growing as it is for playing games.

So what might new iPads look like? That’s one of the intended goals of the new affordable iPad model. This goal is to bring the mathematic sequence to life via the iPad’s hardware and software. Every aspect of the Everyone Can Create program is strategically designed to promote the use of the new iPad in the classroom setting. It still has the same 9.7-inch, 2,048-by-1,536 Retina display, cameras, touch sensor, wireless radios, and even the exact same measurements as the previous model.

This makes things easier to create content on-device and cross sharing it between apps a seamless process – like making music through GarageBand and then using that track ina video presentations through Clips for example. But it would make sense for Apple to unify its design and finger gestures.

This iPad model could compete with products made by Google and Microsoft that are also being used in schools. Bloomberg reported that these “low-cost” iPad devices will be announced alongside a new educational software. The new features have previously only been available on the iPad Pro versions.

“I can’t let you in unless you’re excited!” one said as guests entered. Microsoft, too, offers access to its Office word processing and spreadsheet software, as well as kid-favorite Minecraft. Swift Playgrounds is based on Apple’s Swift programming language. I don’t actually expect it to be called the ePad, as it may well go on general sale further down the line, but I do think that sales may well be restricted to the education market for at least an initial period.

To make it more education-friendly, Apple increased the iCloud storage for schools to 200GB.