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Apple Offering Stripped-Down $999 13" MacBook Air to Educational Institutions Buying in Bulk
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Ssd?
Are you mad, the price is for non SSD machines. Add SSD and price goes up 500 bucks.
update: 64GB SSD is not enough memory.
Are you mad, the price is for non SSD machines. Add SSD and price goes up 500 bucks.
update: 64GB SSD is not enough memory.
Not enough memory for what?
The laptop would be intended as an educational device, so I couldn't really care less if the kid complains that it doesn't have enough room for his music and videos, or that it cannot run the latest games like skyrim. As mentioned above, assignments can be saved on network drives, further freeing up space, and they shouldn't take up more than a few hundred megs tops.
If the school expects the child to purchase it and bring it to and from home daily (like my school does for pupils from grade4 onwards), then the light weight and sleek design would be a boon for their backs. Non-dedicated graphics card and 5-hour batt life should be enough to see the pupil through a typical schooling day (assuming they are not the sort who come to school with their batteries near empty because they are too cheapskate to charge at home).
11' screen may be too small for younger children; 13' seems to be the best choice if you expect them to work on it comfortably for any extended period of time. If you need more space, SD cards and thumbdrives are fairly inexpensive.
Apps too would be a major boon, with iworks cheaper than office.
One issue I can think of is funding. If you want 1 laptop per pupil, that easily runs into $30k per class (assuming each class has 30 pupils), multiply that by 8 classes a lv, 6 lvs in an elementary school...
And I assume this is before applecare. The price can be a deterrent, but honestly, laptops of equivalent specs aren't really much cheaper either.Also, seeing the way some of the kids in my school handle laptops, I worry that the aluminium casing makes it prone to dents. That's one plus for the lenovo thinkpads we are using - they are durable as tanks, though after 5 years, their age is starting to show.
This deal is pathetic. That's the best Apple can do? 2GB? I wish Apple would finally join us in 2010 and realize that 2gb is no longer an acceptable amount of ram for any new computer.
Close to half a trillion dollar market cap...over 100 billion in cash...and these specs are the best apple can do for our students!
Just based on what you said here...
SSD over HDD
i5 over i3
Mac OS over Windows.
These are not comparable computers...
Considering its for students are not Design professionals then its not bad, don't like it don't buy oh wait you can't you have to by the normal ones which are still not that expensive.
I rather then got iPad 3 than spend it on laptops; from my own kids that they get more from it on a day to day base than laptops, but it really depends on age group. Also would make kids write more by hand still a useful feature in our technology world.
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And when did 10 year old need i7 8 core to do some typing? Please do enlighten us.
My own kids use Macbook White and its blazing fast for them and their needs. Sure when they get to high school, which is off for another lots and lots of years then I can see where they probably will need more, but computers will be the least of their problem if its anything like when I went to high school.
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To small even for kids, we like for them to keep their eyesight you a little bit longer. Does anyone here actually use a 11" air without a larger monitor. I mean really who over 30 could use that without above perfect eyesight.
Now when retina based air come out well that will be a different story.
Not sure what you mean there. As an educational establishment, we get the media for free and pay for a site licence for windows, office, CALs for every damn thing based on "full time equivalence" - that is, if you have 300 full time members of staff (and that includes adding up the part time staff's time too, so two people who work half a week each count as one person) and 5,000 computers, you pay the base price for whatever options you want times 300 and that licences you for 5000 machines (or 10,000 or whatever).
Yeah. We've licenced creative suite for all our macs and PCs. Funnily enough, an Adobe "site licence" only covers 500 computers, or something like that, so if you have 5000 computers you have to buy 10 "site" licences. Still much cheaper than what non-educational places would pay though, of course.
Apple is still a profit-oriented organisation. You were expecting apple to sell them away at cost price?
Funny that nobody mentioned that this air is pretty much similar to the old macbook spec-wise. So in the very least, schools aren't really any worse off.
Well as I said, this wasn't relevant for two reasons.
1) What the macbooks had was arguably appropriate for their time. These special Airs, not so much. Especially given how Lion consumes memory.
2) In either case, it was both easy and cheap, and therefore quite cost effective to upgrade the ram in a macbook. Again, these special Airs, not so much.
64GB memory? Is this a joke?
Our high-school use Apple and their One-to-one learning. We are all provided with MacBooks. As I started two and a half year ago, I got the last iteration of the white MacBook (before the white Unibody arrived). My 160GB's are nearly filled. We use our MacBooks for nearly everything.
All of the research is done on our MacBooks, all of the note-taking from classes, keynote-presentations, creating films in iMovie, audio-recording (often for e.g. oral-commentaries regarding literary works and such). We use them for Scientific Research in our laboratories, using Vernier probes to measure ion concentrations of water, nitrate concentrations, light probes to measure light availability, et.c. et.c. We write our final internal assessments in each subject on the MacBooks, in e.g. Economics, Swedish, English, Maths, Psychology and Scientific subjects. We create webpages and so on.
I do not have one, one single private item on this computer (such as Movies, Music, Games and such) and yet, I've managed to fill probably 85% of my 160GB HD. Honestly 64 GB, that's the same size as the top of the line iPhone! This would never be enough for my purposes.
Our high-school use Apple and their One-to-one learning. We are all provided with MacBooks. As I started two and a half year ago, I got the last iteration of the white MacBook (before the white Unibody arrived). My 160GB's are nearly filled. We use our MacBooks for nearly everything.
All of the research is done on our MacBooks, all of the note-taking from classes, keynote-presentations, creating films in iMovie, audio-recording (often for e.g. oral-commentaries regarding literary works and such). We use them for Scientific Research in our laboratories, using Vernier probes to measure ion concentrations of water, nitrate concentrations, light probes to measure light availability, et.c. et.c. We write our final internal assessments in each subject on the MacBooks, in e.g. Economics, Swedish, English, Maths, Psychology and Scientific subjects. We create webpages and so on.
I do not have one, one single private item on this computer (such as Movies, Music, Games and such) and yet, I've managed to fill probably 85% of my 160GB HD. Honestly 64 GB, that's the same size as the top of the line iPhone! This would never be enough for my purposes.
Airs are all Flash Memory/SSD... The chips are directly on the board.
And 64Gb in a school setting is more than enough... More than likely the IT would set up the entire school as separate Users accounts and they can grab any machine at the start of a lesson log in via a server and all the files are on the server too - you wouldn't be storing anything on the HD - just for applications etc.
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Simple. Remote school server or cloud storage.
Homework all backed up and can access anywhere from any machine.
No more "Sorry My HD crashed" excuses.
What an atrocious waste of money.
MacBook air(s) are more style than substance. Computer = good, spending to much on computers which don't accomplish anything unique = bad / waste of money.
MacBook air(s) are more style than substance. Computer = good, spending to much on computers which don't accomplish anything unique = bad / waste of money.
As opposed to what? Personally I'd rather a school bought 100 of these than some of the crap they do spend money on.
I know of a school that installed 200 dells worth $800 at a cost of $2K per machine - including all the research, committee meeting, installation and hardwiring and they were out of date before they were even installed. and pretty much worthless. What makes it worse they had vista on them and upgrades were never considered and now too costly - so they are stuck with it.
Airs retain some decent retail value at least... and um... no windoze.
Schools are worse than governments - why do something right when you can discuss it for a year then make a half arsed decision. Job justification.
The Lenovo in his example is the perfect solution for schools wish to provide their students with laptops.
It is built to last better than the air (stronger plastic body, spill prof keyboard and expendability).
SSD over HDD Why would any school want to pay premium to equipped their computers with SSD? Schools will find extremely hard to justify this luxury item on their expenses.
i5 over i3 the i3 is more than powerful for non-intensive workload, and the performance differences 5 years down the line will not be large enough to justify the extra cost.
Mac OS over Windows again this is often a personal choice and is hard to justify spend extra money on OSX over Windows licence.
A school can provide twice their students with Lenovo laptops on the same budget or provide all their students with laptops for half the cost of macbook air.
At end of the day, it is tax payers money, and the Lenovo laptops are simply more sensible choice for mass deployment in a school.
I am the tech specialist for a school district, and I manage about 700 student computers and another 200 staff computers. They are all MacBooks, MacBook Pros, or iMacs. We do have some small Windows installations as well. I will tell you it takes a lot more of my time per machine to manage the Windows machines than the Macs.
We reimage all of our student machines at least once per year, and I can get through all of the Macs in less than a week... while doing other things that need to get done. We are a one-man operation, and it would take more staffing if we had to manage 700 student and 200 staff Windows machines.
Also, our Macs come with a lot of great software... not sure the Lenovo laptop for $429 comes with much... perhaps it does.
The initial sticker price of a laptop is not the only factor here. We really don't care about volume of computers... we care about the kinds of things kids are doing with the computers. Money is always a factor, but it can't be the only factor when deciding on purchases in education.
With all this said, I do think the MacBook Air 13" with only 2GB RAM and 64GB SSD is spec'ed way too low. Sure, we still have old MacBooks with 1GB RAM and 80GB HDD running fine, but that is with Snow Leopard... and these are 4 or 5 year old machines. I would have liked to see Apple at least bump up the non-upgradable memory from 2GB to 4GB. The SDDs in the Airs can always be upgraded down the road (when flash storage gets cheaper), but the freakin' memory is soldered to the board. UGH!
How about an $899 MacBook Air 13" with 4GB/64GB to replace the discontinued $899 MacBook with 2GB/250GB? Come on, Apple... you can do it! lol
While the ULV i5 will beat the 2.4 GHz Penryn, it's otherwise a terrible change in offering. Same RAM capacity (hell, even faster RAM), but non-upgradable, and 64GB of storage, down from an upgradable 250 GB. That's terrible. Although as far as durability goes, the Air is the next best thing from the white MacBook; it would certainly be better than the 13" Pro, which would dent AND have a hard drive in it.
Basically it's a "buy 11.6" of screen, get the extra 2.7" free" kind of deal.
Plastic dings, aluminum dents. Schools want a plastic exterior for their laptops.
While I, both professionally and personally prefer Mac OS X over Windows and firmly think that the former is better suited in the education market than the latter (where I also firmly believe the latter is pretty much unparalleled in most corporate environments), if they can get by with Windows, then I completely agree with everything you say here. Plus Lenovo is about as close as you will ever get to the build quality, and ease of servicing found on a MacBook Pro on a PC laptop.
Basically it's a "buy 11.6" of screen, get the extra 2.7" free" kind of deal.
Plastic dings, aluminum dents. Schools want a plastic exterior for their laptops.
While I, both professionally and personally prefer Mac OS X over Windows and firmly think that the former is better suited in the education market than the latter (where I also firmly believe the latter is pretty much unparalleled in most corporate environments), if they can get by with Windows, then I completely agree with everything you say here. Plus Lenovo is about as close as you will ever get to the build quality, and ease of servicing found on a MacBook Pro on a PC laptop.
Only 2GB of RAM? That's like one OSX version away from obsolete.
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Why don't you look that up on the internet?
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Why don't you look that up on the internet?
They actually offer all of the "standard" MBA configurations to EDU channels as well, so this is a:
"Get a 5 pack of 11.6" models for $929ea. or upgrade your screens to 13" for $70ea more. The 4GB/128GB standard 13" MBA is also available for $1,229ea.
The real story here is the existence of a special EDU model others can't get.
B
At my high school we have Lenovo netbooks... One of the main questions everyone asked is "why can't we have MacBooks like at primary school?". Even the teachers and the hardcore windows guys agree that MacBooks would be better in a school setting
The point of the price cut is to get decent screen real estate into the hands of educators/educatees for iBooks Author/reader development. Think Big Picture.
The whole point of iBooks is to trap the content *format* inside the Walled Garden (the content is free to roam the barren wilderness of Windose Land, but the format shall be kept safe within the Garden). And the whole point of iBooks Author is to trap the Author within the Mac *computer* Walled Garden.
It does Apple no good whatsovever to create the Walled Garden if it does not provide an "accessible" entry point into the Walled Garden. A reduced price MacBook Air for education (at the basic, this-is-all-you-need-for-high-school level) is like lowering the drawbridge for the author. "Power" users like engineers and scientists or graphic designers (as an Engineer, I admit that the artists power needs generally put mine to shame) can continue using bigger boxen. That is not the point of this endeavor.
The iPad 3 and the concurrent price cut in the iPad 2 (maybe even the Original iPad will be kept alive, because you don't need a camera in order to consume content) will be like lowering the drawbridge for the reader.
This is not a Phyrric Victory. This is a Trojan Horse. (And not in the viral sense.)