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Apple had an amazing product for schools and was dominating one-to-one laptop programs with their highly-repairable white plastic macbooks. And then they discon

Apple had an amazing product for schools and was dominating one-to-one laptop programs with their highly-repairable white plastic macbooks. And then they discontinued them to push iPads and the far-pricier macbook pros. Apple willingly jettisoned the school market to focus on consumers

mcphage 9y ago
> Apple willingly jettisoned the school market to focus on consumers Which is foolish; they have the resources to devote to both, but they don't know how to do more than 1 thing at a time. The lack of bulk iPad management tools until recently (and I don't even know how good they are now) makes them almost unusable in a lot of school situations.
- scott00 9y ago
  > Which is foolish; they have the resources to devote to both, but they don't know how to do more than 1 thing at a time. Lack of focus has a real cost, even to large companies. It's the difference between polished slick software, and a design-by-committee mess.
  - mcphage 9y ago
    Absolutely, and I have loved Apple's focus. But I think that as their product line has expanded, they've devoted the same amount of focus to more things, rather than increasing the "overall focus", if that even means anything. So they're doing more things, more poorly, instead of when they had a smaller list of things they were doing. And I don't think they can really get by these days doing fewer things; I think they're right that an integrated ecosystem is the right answer, but part of that is, ecosystems are large. So they do need to do the more things, but they just don't seem to be doing the more things that well.
  - foolrush 9y ago
    Except this plays into the mythmaking. Apple would very likely _love_ to have a second or third profit generator. If you examine the profits taken on iPads, MacBooks, and everything else Apple does (see http://www.asymco.com http://www.asymco.com) relative to the iPhone, it is a one trick pony. Hard to peel apart your "focus" when 85% of your business relies on it.
    - eastWestMath 9y ago
      Apple is still the most profitable laptop/desktop producer in the world, but that market is dwarfed by the smartphone market.
  - srssays 9y ago
    Apple is $750b company built on one product (iPhone). Their business hangs on a thread. What happens if they have a big recall like Samsung had?
    - mcphage 9y ago
      > What happens if they have a big recall like Samsung had? They have enough cash reserves to keep going for a long time, as well as other product lines that were successful enough to get them to where they are.
- Corrado 9y ago
  I've been in the trenches with iPad management systems, from both Apple and a 3rd party, and they suck. Big time. The Apple systems (iPad Configurator and Profile Manager) both are hard to use and not suitable for large rollouts. Configurator requires you to physically plug in each iPad in order to manage it, which is untenable for 300 iPads. Profile Manager is a Rails 2.x piece of software that has only seen small updates and works sporadically. When the Apple products didn't work in our situation we choose a 3rd party vendor. The results were much the same; sometimes it would work and push apps out, sometimes it would completely ignore your requests or only push out apps to some of the iPads. We even thought the Apple Classroom would save the day, only to be told that it's still in beta (after a year!) and we could only get access in August of last year. It's still not GA as far as I know. tl;dr We are switching to Chromebooks next year and will be able to outfit 3 entire grade levels for almost the same price as purchasing iPads for 1 grade level. Apple has lost it's way and I'm not sure it can come back. It used to chase ideals, now it chases money.
  - mcphage 9y ago
    That's so incredibly frustrating. Device management is something every school needs; how could they fuck that up so completely?
rcarmo 9y ago
Well, that was what we saw from outside. I'm partial to the notion that they actually believed they were going to have a broader appeal with iPads. However, as a parent and as a long-time Apple user, I think they are completely incompetent at multi-user scenarios in general - Classroom 2.0 is "cute" but impractical in the few times I tried to help teachers to use it, iPad multi-user is nowhere to be seen in practice, and the price points are completely outrageous (my kids' school uses iPads). To add insult to injury, parental control is also MIA (tangent, I know, but relevant in the overall picture). Chromebooks walk all over that - they're cheaper, have pretty decent unified management (not really business-grade, but straightforward and effective enough for K12, for instance), and they have real keyboards. Things start flaking out a bit upmarket (when you're in college, a Chromebook and Google services might not be the best computer/environment to use depending on your major, for a lot of reasons), but in general, and from what I picked up during a deep dive into the education segment a couple of months ago, I'm not surprised they're popular. What I _am_ surprised (and then again, not much, really) is that Google and their hardware partners don't seem to tackle European markets in earnest. I had to buy a Chromebook in the US for my own use, and if I were to replace it today I would probably have to have something shipped from the US again - they are nowhere to be found in retail in my neck of the woods, and European online retailers only seem to stock a few outdated models. So I guess the scenario the article describes is going to remain US-only for a long while.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  It's also possible the Chromebook paradigm conflicts with European law, given that it basically forces you to use cloud services from a single provider with mandatory privacy waiving.
- isodude 9y ago
  I can buy Chromebooks for 20+ EUR from several brands and several stores here in Sweden. From what I gather it's newer models. (http://prisjakt.nu http://prisjakt.nu being a good site to get a good idea about the current state)
  - whyagaindavid 9y ago

mcphage 9y ago

> Apple willingly jettisoned the school market to focus on consumers Which is foolish; they have the resources to devote to both, but they don't know how to do more than 1 thing at a time. The lack of bulk iPad management tools until recently (and I don't even know how good they are now) makes them almost unusable in a lot of school situations.

scott00 9y ago
> Which is foolish; they have the resources to devote to both, but they don't know how to do more than 1 thing at a time. Lack of focus has a real cost, even to large companies. It's the difference between polished slick software, and a design-by-committee mess.
- mcphage 9y ago
  Absolutely, and I have loved Apple's focus. But I think that as their product line has expanded, they've devoted the same amount of focus to more things, rather than increasing the "overall focus", if that even means anything. So they're doing more things, more poorly, instead of when they had a smaller list of things they were doing. And I don't think they can really get by these days doing fewer things; I think they're right that an integrated ecosystem is the right answer, but part of that is, ecosystems are large. So they do need to do the more things, but they just don't seem to be doing the more things that well.
- foolrush 9y ago
  Except this plays into the mythmaking. Apple would very likely _love_ to have a second or third profit generator. If you examine the profits taken on iPads, MacBooks, and everything else Apple does (see http://www.asymco.com http://www.asymco.com) relative to the iPhone, it is a one trick pony. Hard to peel apart your "focus" when 85% of your business relies on it.
  - eastWestMath 9y ago
    Apple is still the most profitable laptop/desktop producer in the world, but that market is dwarfed by the smartphone market.
- srssays 9y ago
  Apple is $750b company built on one product (iPhone). Their business hangs on a thread. What happens if they have a big recall like Samsung had?
  - mcphage 9y ago
    > What happens if they have a big recall like Samsung had? They have enough cash reserves to keep going for a long time, as well as other product lines that were successful enough to get them to where they are.
Corrado 9y ago
I've been in the trenches with iPad management systems, from both Apple and a 3rd party, and they suck. Big time. The Apple systems (iPad Configurator and Profile Manager) both are hard to use and not suitable for large rollouts. Configurator requires you to physically plug in each iPad in order to manage it, which is untenable for 300 iPads. Profile Manager is a Rails 2.x piece of software that has only seen small updates and works sporadically. When the Apple products didn't work in our situation we choose a 3rd party vendor. The results were much the same; sometimes it would work and push apps out, sometimes it would completely ignore your requests or only push out apps to some of the iPads. We even thought the Apple Classroom would save the day, only to be told that it's still in beta (after a year!) and we could only get access in August of last year. It's still not GA as far as I know. tl;dr We are switching to Chromebooks next year and will be able to outfit 3 entire grade levels for almost the same price as purchasing iPads for 1 grade level. Apple has lost it's way and I'm not sure it can come back. It used to chase ideals, now it chases money.
- mcphage 9y ago
  That's so incredibly frustrating. Device management is something every school needs; how could they fuck that up so completely?

rcarmo 9y ago

Well, that was what we saw from outside. I'm partial to the notion that they actually believed they were going to have a broader appeal with iPads. However, as a parent and as a long-time Apple user, I think they are completely incompetent at multi-user scenarios in general - Classroom 2.0 is "cute" but impractical in the few times I tried to help teachers to use it, iPad multi-user is nowhere to be seen in practice, and the price points are completely outrageous (my kids' school uses iPads). To add insult to injury, parental control is also MIA (tangent, I know, but relevant in the overall picture). Chromebooks walk all over that - they're cheaper, have pretty decent unified management (not really business-grade, but straightforward and effective enough for K12, for instance), and they have real keyboards. Things start flaking out a bit upmarket (when you're in college, a Chromebook and Google services might not be the best computer/environment to use depending on your major, for a lot of reasons), but in general, and from what I picked up during a deep dive into the education segment a couple of months ago, I'm not surprised they're popular. What I _am_ surprised (and then again, not much, really) is that Google and their hardware partners don't seem to tackle European markets in earnest. I had to buy a Chromebook in the US for my own use, and if I were to replace it today I would probably have to have something shipped from the US again - they are nowhere to be found in retail in my neck of the woods, and European online retailers only seem to stock a few outdated models. So I guess the scenario the article describes is going to remain US-only for a long while.

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
It's also possible the Chromebook paradigm conflicts with European law, given that it basically forces you to use cloud services from a single provider with mandatory privacy waiving.
isodude 9y ago
I can buy Chromebooks for 20+ EUR from several brands and several stores here in Sweden. From what I gather it's newer models. (http://prisjakt.nu http://prisjakt.nu being a good site to get a good idea about the current state)
- whyagaindavid 9y ago