<story><title>Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/technology/apple-products-schools-education.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DaiPlusPlus</author><text>I remember the huge push when the iPad came out and all the talk about how it would replace textbooks and exercise books.&lt;p&gt;It could only be because school administrators were won-over by the engaging user-experience - completely overlooking practicalities - back in 2010 even into 2014 iOS lacked decent enterprise-management tools that would enable staff to lock devices down as they&amp;#x27;re obvious distraction devices - things are made worse by Apple&amp;#x27;s decision to not have multiple user-profiles on the iPad and confusion with how Apple IDs work. I understand they&amp;#x27;ve gone some way to address those issues - but other concerns still apply, such as the vision of a wide range of high-quality (and interactive, no-less!) iBooks to replace textbooks - simply hasn&amp;#x27;t happened due to massive cost of authoring even a single iBook. But the main blocker I feel is that staff (both teachers and school district IT folks) just don&amp;#x27;t want to have to manage them. I know an IT contractor who resigned his job at a private school after having to deal with setting up hundreds of iPad Mini devices for every student - he just simply hated the work involved.&lt;p&gt;As Apple is neglecting the desktop market, they&amp;#x27;re just as well neglecting the education market: remember when Apple had massive education market penetration in the late-1980s? Now there&amp;#x27;s not even an equivalent of the old eMac unless you count the now 3-years-old Mac Mini models.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Merad</author><text>It blows my mind that Apple has basically put no effort at all into supporting the multi user business&amp;#x2F;education market.  Our company rolled out our first LOB mobile app last year.  Only six devices are involved, but they&amp;#x27;re basically in use 24&amp;#x2F;7 and are handed off at shift changes.  The amount of hoops we had to jump through were absurd both in terms of device management setup and adding some features to the app to make it feel more &amp;quot;multi user&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s supposed to be an intrinsically safe iPad Mini case available later this year (IIRC), and our manufacturing areas are salivating over the possibilities... But we might have to disappoint them, because the overhead of trying to manage hundreds of iPads would be truly insane.</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/technology/apple-products-schools-education.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>DaiPlusPlus</author><text>I remember the huge push when the iPad came out and all the talk about how it would replace textbooks and exercise books.&lt;p&gt;It could only be because school administrators were won-over by the engaging user-experience - completely overlooking practicalities - back in 2010 even into 2014 iOS lacked decent enterprise-management tools that would enable staff to lock devices down as they&amp;#x27;re obvious distraction devices - things are made worse by Apple&amp;#x27;s decision to not have multiple user-profiles on the iPad and confusion with how Apple IDs work. I understand they&amp;#x27;ve gone some way to address those issues - but other concerns still apply, such as the vision of a wide range of high-quality (and interactive, no-less!) iBooks to replace textbooks - simply hasn&amp;#x27;t happened due to massive cost of authoring even a single iBook. But the main blocker I feel is that staff (both teachers and school district IT folks) just don&amp;#x27;t want to have to manage them. I know an IT contractor who resigned his job at a private school after having to deal with setting up hundreds of iPad Mini devices for every student - he just simply hated the work involved.&lt;p&gt;As Apple is neglecting the desktop market, they&amp;#x27;re just as well neglecting the education market: remember when Apple had massive education market penetration in the late-1980s? Now there&amp;#x27;s not even an equivalent of the old eMac unless you count the now 3-years-old Mac Mini models.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paulddraper</author><text>As a middle-school student in the early 2000s, I helped part-time with IT at a Mac-only school. Macintoshes, iMacs, eMacs.&lt;p&gt;People were less familiar with Macs than PCs, but from an IT perspective, it was heaven. There were only a few models, they were reliable, and everything &amp;quot;just worked&amp;quot; together. The most common snag was attempting to get floppies to work with people&amp;#x27;s PCs from home.&lt;p&gt;Sad to see the Apple desktops gone.</text></comment>