I know for a kindergarten classroom specifically, the amount of useful and quality software available on an iPad far exceeds what's available on a Chromebook (ie, as a web app).
Understood, but the topic here is iWork-vs-gDocs and the collaborative applications (word processing, presentations, spreadsheets) in an education setting.
iPads are great for certain purposes like the Osmo. They're a relative failure when it comes to typing up a book report or creating a group slide presentation.
Personally I don't know of any schools using tablets that aren't iPads. I'm not sure that the K-5 education market is a segment that gets a lot of attention on Android.
Osmo, one of the best and most funded education software startups, doesn't even make Android versions.
I think the parent is referring to Android apps being available on Chromebooks now. However, that's still in a pilot/beta phase, and has not deployed broadly yet.
My tablet comment was just meant to give context to why I don't think having access to Android apps on Chromebooks is a game changer in K-5 education.
Probably the higher up you get the less students are using "educational software" and more just common productivity programs and I'd suspect the gap between platforms fades away there for general purpose reports, presentations, etc.
Some people claim Chromebooks already have the best education software (as in learning stuff, handing in reports and teachers grading them online, not playing games).
Given that advanced CAD software nowadays run inside a browser, I think the chromebooks will work just fine even the higher up you go.
I'd be surprised if Android tablets have any significant uptake in business or education settings. Not only do they generally lack software support in terms of security updates (imagine connecting your desktop PC to the internet without access to Windows updates), but also their apps are often just blown-up phone apps.
It's an old trope isn't it? How many families bought their first PC and subscribed to AOL so kids could look things up for their homework? But homework never required that. It's a great excuse to give parents that want to buy anyway.
My kids' middle school just moved to iPads from Chromebooks, which I thought was weird. (The elementary school had some iPads, so my kids felt like they were moving up to adult-ish laptops when they moved to middle school.)
The iPads had iWorks pre-installed, so I imagine they'll be using this feature.
My kids (10 and 7 years) have iPads in their school. They were bought for educational purposes but they are full of games. While I like the idea kids should learn to code. I really don't see any need for children that are not fluent on reading and writing to have any computers in the school.
You rather have a sub 300$ device than a premium above 1000$ product? I know the Thinkpad brand is being abused with Ideapads and their similarity but to say Chromebooks are better is a lie.
The Thinkpad's are $400 devices (11e is the model), and they are indeed junk. The battery lasts around 3-4 hours which means kids have to find an outlet to work. The charging circuit makes an intermittent high pitched whine that many kids are complaining about (I can't hear it). When my daughter's is plugged in, the time until charged is always "UNKNOWN". Apparently, that's a common problem.
There have been issues with the touchpad as well, although my daughter's has been fine.
So, yes I wish they used Chromebooks. We could at least just buy a new one, log in, and have everything there ready to go.
One of the biggest problems with Lenovo's acquisition of IBM's laptop division is their constant dilution of the ThinkPad name. Initially, in the first few years after the acquisition, Lenovo introduced a line of budget devices under the 'E' series and these were not marked with the ThinkPad identity because they were of significantly poorer construction and did not come with the same warranty and service options. In the years since, though, they've started slapping the ThinkPad name on these and a number of new low-cost product lines.
In practice, it's only really a ThinkPad if them model number starts with a T, W, or X. Unfortunately Lenovo itself is working hard to eliminate this distinction, positioning ThinkPad as another Dell or HP instead of as a high-end enterprise and luxury product line.
The 11e is indeed a ThinkPad. You might not think it's deserving of the name, but that's where ThinkPad is these days.
I've had a bunch of ThinkPads over the years and two are still in use.
I have a T520 that I now use basically as a terminal. It's a very creaky, heavy, machine that never gave me more than about 3 hours of battery, and the keyboard was terrible. But it sits there and keeps working (I use an external keyboard, monitor, and mouse).
I also have a ThinkPad Yoga 12.5. I really like the keyboard, but again the battery life isn't weak (4 hours). I occasionally think about getting something a little bigger, but the small size is pretty nice for traveling.
11e and x131e are available as windows and chromebooks. I think the chromebook version has an AMD cpu and a smaller battery
These are definitely not the best laptops Lenovo has designed. Pretty much the bulkiest 11" laptop you can buy with the worst display, the worst keyboard I have ever touched and the crappy battery life and the fan noise are legendary...
But in the end, both were better than anything I had when I grove up. So yeah, basically "kids today..."
ThinkPads used to be uniformly excellent, but these days it's a crapshoot. Even the best hardware comes with Lenovo's software installed and my advice to anybody that buys a ThinkPad is to remove as much of the Lenovo bloatware as you can.
> I also don't see where iOS' "Shared iPad" feature lets you log in to any iPad anywhere like a Google Apps account would.
You can certainly log into any iPad in the school.
Regarding other devices, AFAICT you log into Shared iPad with a 'Managed Apple ID', which you could probably also log into on icloud.com or use natively from personal Apple devices you have, though since macOS and iOS currently only support one iCloud account configured at a time (per user account in the former case) the utility would be limited, as you'd probably also have a personal Apple ID.
Those Chromebooks in many cases get coupled with Google's classroom software. One doesn't imply the other, but lots of schools seem to be jumping on the integrated platform.
Eh, having Chromebooks really does imply using Google Classroom.
If for no other reason, that Google Apps is the default office suite on Chromebooks, Google Apps for Education is free, and Google Classroom is included with that. Most schools don't have much in the way of a technology budget, so they win by default.
I don't really understand the point of iWork. I did back when Apple was worried that MS would not maintain Office on the Mac, and when Office didn't run on iOS. But since those cases aren't true, it's a lot of engineering expenditure for a feature that will not cause someone to buy a Mac, iPhone or iPad. Even now they are still toys even less capable than the clumsy google docs apps.
Any ideas as to why this is worth Apple's time?
(This isn't an anti-Apple rant: I am a heavy user of their hardware).
In addition to the other points that have been raised - Office is expensive! True, Apple's hardware also tends to be pretty expensive, but when you can buy a new iPad for $400 (or MacBook for $900) that'll last several years, an extra $50-$100 per year for Office 365 is a significant addition. Even on more expensive hardware, that's likely the most expensive software purchase most users will ever make... which means that rational or no, some users will shy away from it... and they'd be stuck without an office suite. In comparison, iWork used to cost ($80 back in the days of iWork '09, later $5-10 per app for the rewrites) but has been free for a while now.
Google Docs is free, but as a browser-based interface it's slow and nowhere near the kind of native experience Apple likes to promote; it requires an internet connection on anything but Chrome; it will never be a poster child for the latest macOS features like trackpad-pinch-to-zoom or Versions or the share sheet or whatever. That's on the desktop; on iOS, Google has a set of native apps but they're quite feature-limited.
Also, both Word and Google Docs are owned by companies that directly compete with Apple, and the apps promote the respective company's ecosystem (e.g. for storage, they push you to OneDrive and Google Drive respectively rather than iCloud). For better or worse, Apple wants to control the whole experience and make it all seamless. Not to mention that Apple probably wants to avoid situations where in the future it could be held hostage to some extent by the owner of a 'must-have' app for its platform.
There are less popular alternatives, but they all have their own problems.
Personally, I neither need to open people's Word documents nor have particularly strenuous requirements for a word processor or spreadsheet (or presentation software, but I'm pretty sure Keynote has some fairly decent pluses compared to PowerPoint anyway). So I am quite satisfied by iWork.
LibreOffice on the other hand is free and can actually be a replacement for Excel. I wish Numbers would be a reasonable alternative but it's missing all of the features that actually make Excel useful.
Native feel, reliability, and responsiveness make the iWork apps pleasant to use, if you don't need the full feature set of what MS Office apps offer (e.g., making a "Table of Authorities" in a legal brief). Sometimes one can make better looking documents too.
I find Keynote in particular to be fantastic compared to PPT, especially back when Office 2010 was Microsoft's offering, and wasn't retina-ready. Keynote handles vector graphics well and does pretty crazy animations that PPT would choke on.
I tried to go iWork only for a while and numbers barely made it for me. It had too small a level of functionality and in exchange was more complicated than it needed to be to get a small amount out. I found Soulver (a re-imagining of the calculator interface) was both simpler and more powerful for straightforward calculations -- by the time it tops out, Numbers has probably topped out.
But the home point is a good one: Numbers was great for making up a weekly chores sheet for the kid, easily decorated with fun photos and such. Still: does that justify Apple's investment?
I tried to use Numbers for some biology work when I was in school and found it frustratingly difficult to use. I'd type something in to a cell, it'd autocomplete, I'd cancel the autocompletion, but it still did not give me full control over the cell. There were other things that were frustrating and just flat out didn't make sense, like the way it would fill data automatically.
You are right that Apple needed iWork for iOS/Mac because they couldn't depend on Microsoft. But, now that they've got iWork it's another tentpole Apple can use to keep consumers locked into their platform.
I switched from Keynote to Google Slides purely for the collaboration. I very much doubt I'll switch back.
If I send a non-Mac-user a Keynote presentation they'll import it to PowerPoint and send me back that, which I have to import, etc.
I find it interesting that web apps are actually better than desktop apps for this stuff. Even five years ago I would have questioned that ever happening.
I doubt they spend that much on it and it gives SMB's an additional cost savings by going with Macs; if they don't NEED office the Apple iWork software can be good enough to serve their purposes.
I worked on Microsoft Works back when Apple Works was kicking their butt. Eventually that got cancelled in favor of just "Office".
Apple's works apps are vastly better than microsofts. Yes, Microsofts do have 30+ years of features shellacked on like so many layers of paint, but I've never needed to do something in Works that I haven't been able to do. And the hassle of dealing with the terrible UI, and terrible experience of microsoft products effectively renders their (presumed I don't really know at this point) additional features useless.
I regularly use Pages, Numbers and Keynote. All three are great and I value my macs that much more because they are there.
Recently I tried downloading LibreOffice because I wanted A visio like drawing program. I've been looking for one of these for years and they all suck- Omnigraffle, visio, etc.
MacDraw was perfect, it's exactly what I need.
Only drawback in Works is there's no Macdraw replacement. (eg: a sorta object oriented drawing program- the drawing capabilities of keynote are very close and so that's what I use.)
Google docs apps are far less capable than the Works apps. Calling them toys seems silly. Google's apps are clumsy yes, but they don't do much at all, nothing more than Works as far as the areas I care about... and they run in the browser poorly. Even Works apps work better in the browser.
Does it work on the web even for the people that don't own anything Apple, maybe only an iTunes account? Because if it's not interoperable with non Apple devices and OSes it's going to stay small. Think of Google Docs working only on Android and Chromebooks.
Exactly! And yet they make that face like this is the first time anyone has thought about it. I know it's for the marketing and RDF, but still. Collaborative editing was solved by Google Wave.
It's kind of crazy to me that TechCrunch misspelled the product name in both the headline and body of the story and no one has noticed. It's iWork (singular), not iWorks: http://www.apple.com/iwork/
This should have been introduced to the iWorks suite a long time ago. They've lost whatever lead they had by ignoring iWorks for the past decade or more.
It should be emphasized that they've ignored iWorks for a long time.....it's hard to trust that it won't regress again after the renewed emphasis.
If they had spent the last decade making iWorks a replacement for Office (making it handle Excel, for example), they would be in a really good place right now. Instead, it's hard to take them seriously.
You're being silly. They have spent the past decade making iWorks better, and in fact, the whole app was revamped from the ground up about 2 years ago, to bring perfect compatibility across platforms from mac to ios.
It's a far better application than anything Microsoft or Google is giving. Google's only run in the browser, and poorly compared to Apple's browser choice, and Microsofts is expensive, buggy and while it has immense numbers of features it has terrible UI.
> It's a far better application than anything Microsoft or Google is giving. Google's only run in the browser, and poorly compared to Apple's browser choice, and Microsofts is expensive, buggy and while it has immense numbers of features it has terrible UI.
None of the points you made are true. Granted things like UI can be very objective, but how someone can with a straight face say Excel is uglier than Numbers (have you seen those awful randomly colored icons?) is beyond me.
It's a far better application than anything Microsoft or Google is giving.
No. Again, if they had stopped playing around with the UI, stopped playing with file-formats in a way that breaks backwards compatibility, and instead focused on making the product more useful than Office (especially focusing on making Numbers a viable product), they would be in a good spot now.
Of course. And if they come out with another new feature I'm sure you'll point out how it should have been in version 1. But getting v1.0 out the door is tough - trying to add every feature will just delay it indefinitely.
The lack of discrimination lawsuits towards apple means that they are probably fair in their promotions. And with the cash apple is having - there would be at least a couple of big settlements if there was discrimination at play.
Tim Cook has been the CEO of Apple for five years. Based on the executive team he has in place, it would appear that diversity hasn't been a priority for him.
Nobody just replaces people on the executive team, they leave, retire or fuck up and are let go. Tim Cook himself has been on the executive team for a long time and a lot of the others also have been on the team for a long time.
Improving diversity requires changes in hiring, promotion and culture. It will take time for the number of employees who are part of underrepresented minorities to rise and for them to rise in rank until they eventually become part of the generation that replaces the generation that currently fills the executive team.
I'm a feminist, I like Apple and I want it to become a more diverse company because I think that's good for society and I think it would allow Apple to make better products and push the industry even more to innovate. I do think Apple is trying, I don't think they're doing quite as well as they could. It's perfectly fine and necessary to criticize, to push them but there is no magic button that Tim Cook can push and make everything instantly better. No matter how much you may want to, stopping decades of discrimination takes time and undoing the damage it caused takes longer still. It sucks and it's not fair but I understand that people are angry about it but it's not fair to blame Tim Cook for it. And quite frankly, if you believe that a gay man from Alabama doesn't care about discrimination and wouldn't push that magic button if it existed, I'm not sure there is anyone capable of satisfying your expectations.
I almost came along with a quip very similar to your closing sentence; and I'm glad someone said it after that comment sitting there uncontested for two hours.
This thing going on where one just looks at %person%, acknowledges that they are (A) old (B) white (c) male or (D) all of the above and basing all value judgments on those variables regardless of other externalities or facts like what their sexual orientation might be and how it could possibly inform endeavors of intersectionality and diversity within a corporation that we simply aren't privy to as consumers BECAUSE of said variables seems to me like flipping the script on discrimination and bias and overcorrecting hard, right into the side of a building, and what's more it seems destructively infantile.
It's not. There was a black woman at WWDC who gave a great presentation just a few months ago. Apple has had female presenters at a large number of their events, as far back as the 2001 time frame.
Don't believe the BS Spin TechCrunch writes-- they are about as credible as the weekly world news.
Usable keyboard, multiple logins, gDocs collaboration, low replacement cost, etc etc etc.
The fact that the iWorks collaboration was highlighted in an education talk tells me a lot.