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 Pro

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.