[digikazi]

I wonder if Apple is positioning these to counter Google's Chromebooks? The pricing makes sense, especially as lately I've seen some pretty expensive Chrome devices: £500 - £700... which is not that far off from base Macbook Air, but without the quirky limitations.

As an aside, I have been a firm ChromeOS user since 2013; since my computing life at work is pretty complicated, so I wanted to keep it really simple at home. For the most part, this setup worked just fine.

However, lately... I've found the Pixel line to be very underwhelming and expensive - add to that the ever increasing cost of Chromebooks... What can I say? Moving over to the Great Walled Garden of Apple makes sense. I'll probably buy one of these.

[pier25]

The Neo is definitely a response to Chromebooks. Apple bet on the iPad for the education market and lost that bet for obvious reasons. This was already obvious 10 years ago when I was working in edtech.

They've totally lost the plot with iPads IMO. It's a fantastic device to consume media, gaming, and some niche areas like drawing... but other than that?

[deltarholamda]

>They've totally lost the plot with iPads IMO. It's a fantastic device to consume media, gaming, and some niche areas like drawing... but other than that

Every construction admin, supervisor, field inspection guy, etc. has a top of the line iPad Pro, in an Otterbox, with a kind of sling that helps you hold it with one hand, and an Apple Pencil, and they spend all day in Plangrid.

This setup has completely eaten the entire market.

[pier25]

And tons of artists spend their day with Procreate but those are still quite niche use cases.

[mrkpdl]

Construction and illustration are hardly niche industries

[pier25]

Construction is not a niche industry although I would argue otherwise about illustration.

Anyway my previous point was not about those being niche industries but niche use cases as far as iPad users.

[mrkpdl]

Just to clarify, my point was that the construction usage is not niche.

But anyway if you continue along your path of reasoning and discount all use cases one by one you end up with no product at all… or maybe a photo/video player and messaging device. But as proven by the construction and many other use cases the iPad is more than that.

[digikazi]

My last tablet was a Nexus 7, so I wouldn’t know ;)

But on a more serious note yes, I agree with you. Tablets - absolutely great for the use cases you mentioned, for everything else I want a proper keyboard, etc.

[raw_anon_1111]

The problem with competing against Chromebooks is that Chromebooks + GSuite and Google’s managed offerings for schools.

[testfrequency]

Chromebooks are much more secure for enterprise and education.

macOS is awful to manage on an enterprise and education level. This will always be Apple’s achilles heel in truly breaking into this market. Admins will push back.

Google has Security down to a science. ChromeOS has little to no malware. Google is constantly reporting malware and exploits to Apple so they can patch active vulns.

[prepend]

I’m not sure about that. Physical build quality on chromebooks is poor. My kids school switched off because the kids were always breaking them.

iPads a Macs stand up to much more abuse by students.

MacOS has very little malware even though users have more access to do things.

All google data is used to train AI and advertise. I’d like to not have that near my kids. Would rather have Apple’s “make money off hardware” from a data privacy standpoint.

[testfrequency]

I never talked about build quality. There are in fact nice quality ChromeOS devices, it’s just arguably never worth the added expense.

The argument with Chromebooks is you can usually buy 4 of them at the cost of a single Mac.

My point is device management and security. This is what enterprise and education cares about and scopes around.

macOS is not nearly as robust or secure to manage as ChromeOS, and Windows flys above both with almost every single feature being manageable at a domain level.

Also your AI point is moot. Enterprise and Education have much different terms than consumers.

You think Apple is letting Google, Slack, and Zoom use their internal company data for training?

[prepend]

There is no Chromebook with the same build quality as a Mac at a comparable price. Thomas try for $1000 MacBooks and even more so for $600.

This is an important feature as kids are rough on machines.

Security on Macs is good and I’m not sure why you think management is so hard as it’s not the same as windows, but still easy enough to manage a few hundred or thousand for a school system.

[ezfe]

My school, my college, and my current enterprise (Fortune 500, etc.) environment all manage it just fine.

[JSR_FDED]

At my last company the support staff for the Macs was one fifth the size of that supporting the PCs (almost the same quantities of Macs and PCs)

[Closi]

The counter however is that lots of schools are on 365, which doesn’t work so well on a Chromebook but works great on a mac.

[spogbiper]

its quite common for schools to issue windows laptops to staff (who use MS 365) and chromebooks to students (who use Google Classroom). The windows laptops also have no problem with google classroom of course.

[basch]

Apple absolutely needs a management layer, both for school and for family. Apple family controls are sorely broken.

[cyberpunk]

Our work macs are tied into microsoft’s intune thingy, pretty sure that’s enough for most orgs.

Not that i’m a fan of it, but meh it exists.

[basch]

That’s not free. Apples Apple ID management is atrocious. How do you password reset an ID you own?

They need to move to having the students ID under both their parents and the school, detachable from the school when a kid moves.

The devices need to be enrolled to the org and then act as thin clients so any kid can log onto any laptop, not have the laptop locked down to a specific kid.

Apple Parental controls are either controllable on the kids device or one parents device but not both at the same time and definitely not two parents at the same time. Whose bright idea was it not to allow two parents to see and manage a kids settings from their own devices, at the same time. That’s a lot of the world that doesn’t appear to anticipate two parents wanting to manage a kid from separate accounts, but Apple should know better.

[AdamN]

My kids' school uses iPads with GSuite. It seems like a common config.

With Creative Studio Apple could even displace GSuite at some point.