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Academia and the real world are two different entities. Your main goal as a student is to memorize material and ace the test. Your main goal in the real world is to be as productive as possible for your company. Chromebooks are great learning tools to gather information while Macs are great productivity machines.

I'd say your are stuck back in the early '0x's.

Student is to learn, rote memorization is a standards cop-out. In college, that's what internships are also for.
I can do quite a bit on a CB especially with so much available via the cloud or Office 365 and Google.
 
Apple cares a lot more about watchbands than education.
Yep! First Apple, by its actions, says it does not need the Pro market so it dumbed down the Pro line of software and it's letting the Mac Pro die a slow death from abandonment. Now apparently Apple seems to think that the education market is no longer worthy of it attention. Who needs all those future Mac customers who are now students in the K12 system? Let them use Chrome instead. Apple is now a boutique phone and watch company. Oh, and Mac computers? Well the computers only need to be fast enough to develop apps that sit on a smart phone or a watch.
 
You're pretty much right.

The only saving grace is you can use Office.com on them, and still get a more functional set of programs than what Google Docs offers.

It's troubling that these are the things that are starting to dominate schools. You want a kid to function in the real world someday... and the real world is dominated by Windows, Office, and a host of actual programs. Not websites. There's cloud solutions in each space, but they don't hold a candle to the full fledged programs. SAP and Oracle don't need to worry much about WorkDay and Wall Street Systems (and the guys that made Oracle make Workday)... they simply aren't as capable. We should want to provide our children with a knowledge base that provides the broadest foundation for the future... instead we're giving them an incredibly narrow one, because people are cheap.

I love this call out of Workday. The company I work for is a $60B+ BioTech company with something like 35k employees world wide and we use workday. Coming from a company that used Kronos for time/schedule and SAP's LMS Success Factors for development - Workday is a joke.
 
TC was, as usual, arrogant and shortsighted in insisting making a low cost edu model would denigrate the Mac legacy. Ha! Apparently he hasn't really taken notice at the current Mac line up. Apple's "office" apps -- Pages, Numbers are weak too and woefully need a major update to even come up to Office 2011 standards.

heh i think it more a matter of them not really having any lower they can go on the CPU list and still call it an actual computer. i'm still chuckling at the 1.4ghz mac mini... the same speed as the first one I bought in 2004. yeah yeah yeah, newer cpus, faster RAM and all that, its still crippled when things like NUCs come with real processors at a lower price points.
 
Take another look. My Grandson does programming (coding), games, office applications, homework, school specific applications and a bunch more using a Chromebook. They are learning far more real world experiences with Chromebooks then could be accomplished with IOS. A bonus, huge costs savings on top of the learning experience. True, windows has some advantages, the reason some schools are going this way. Either are far superior in the classroom then IOS with Chrome the leader.

My daughter uses Chromebooks at her middle school, and I think they are excellent for grade school/middle school education. They are cheap, reliable, easy to maintain, and have good battery life. It's also very convenient to be able to sign onto Chrome on one of our computers at home, and have access to all her school bookmarks, apps, etc.
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Most schools use Chromebook for 2 reasons only: price and built-in keyboard. School ITs don't want to deal with keyboard add-on, which further increases the overall price.

If Apple makes an educational version of iPad (ePad?) with built-in keyboard using A7 processor (first generation 64-bit processor on iPad mini 2 and iPhone 5s) for $299, many schools will gladly switch from Chromebook.

Do you have experience yourself with this, or your children? There's definitely more than just price and keyboard (although they are big reasons.)

I don't think Google was specifically targeting education when they developed Chrome OS, but in retrospect it is a great education machine.
 
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