MG Siegler, in a surprisingly off the mark article:
As Josh Topolsky points out, Apple does work with school districts to lease iPads on a four-year schedule, presumably at a nice discount. But that means the school owns the iPads and temporarily gives them out to students. That goes against Apple’s stated mission that students should now buy (or get via redemption code) all iBooks textbooks and keep them forever, keeping their notes, highlights, etc.
The school leasing also probably means the iPads are staying at the schools. How does that help for homework? Or are the schools allowing students to take the iPads home, risking losing them or damaging them? That doesn’t seem like a tenable idea for many budget-minded schools.
Actually, that’s exactly what’s happening. My daughter, who’s still in elementary school, has a school provided iPad, and once in a while she’s allowed to take it home.
And while it depends upon the setup, I don’t think it’d be a large stretch to have the textbooks tied to the student’s personal iTunes account. If so, they’d have the books as long as the have the account, which is to say forever, and I’m certain Apple would be happy to provide every student with their own iTunes account.
Even if when the next iPad is announced, the current model drops in price to something like $400 — or even $300 — that’s still an expensive sell to high school students and/or their parents and/or their schools.
Right. Because the $200 iPhone they’ve already got was hard to come by. And teenagers don’t have jobs, and if they did they certainly wouldn’t blow an entire paycheck on an iPad. Yeah, and I didn’t carry hundreds of dollars worth of CD’s, a Panasonic Shockwave, and a cell phone in my backpack everyday either.
I’m worried we may have a chicken and egg problem here. Apple is giving students a huge incentive to use iPads, but it’s still prohibitive for many of those students to get one. And if many can’t get one, does the iBooks program take off like it should?
My daughter hasn’t even hit puberty yet, and she has two iPads — her own at school and the family one at home. She already lives on the thing, and you think there’s a hard sell somewhere?
I have no doubt that in the not-too-distant future, students walk around with tablet computers carrying all of their textbooks and other education needs. But we need to get the tablets in their hands to get to that future.
Dude… you’re looking in the wrong spot, and you’ve forgetten how patient Apple has become.
