I can't counter your well made arguments but I would disagree that Apple has given up. They wouldn't have just made a huge media play for education and they wouldn't have bothered if they really had no intention to stay in education. They've already locked in a few school systems (probably) from that event alone. That brings me to my next point. Apple has and will always only aim for the upper 10% of each market. They have no problem losing out to Google or Microsoft for the other 90% of schools. They are only aiming for public and private schools and universities that support their vision of high end, homogeneous hardware and workflows for each student because those are the only schools that have those budgets. Those are the only schools that can even seriously consider Apple vs. Google vs. Microsoft comparisons.Debatable. I would argue that writing across the curriculum is a critical learning outcome even before grade 7, but your point is reasonable and I will concede it for the point of discussion.
They are losing on both issues. Yes, cost is cost. But iPads lack multiuser support for education. That's a huge issue! With Windows or Chrome OS I can set up the laptops so that 6,000 students can take one out of a cart and log in with their school credentials (LDAP or Active Directory). And then, boom (as Jobs would have said), they have access to their desktop, files, apps, and whatnot else.
With the iPads, they all have to be set up identical for all students with no personalization or file persistence. That's because Apple's multiuser model is unimplementably ridiculous! It presupposes setting up separate accounts for each classroom and the students within it. That's unrealistic, unless you're going to a rich, small, private school. And even there the organizational overhead of doing that every semester for every instructor/classroom might make it not worth it.
They only have a strong foothold with students purchasing their individual machines. And even there the top model that students choose is the MacBook Air, which is comically out of date. Neither the MacBook nor the MacBook Pro are sensible specs for ordinary college students.
On the institutional side, which is the side that matters in education, Apple is loosing badly. 20 years ago you would walk through a university computer lab, and half of the machines in there would Apple computers. Today, it's a couple of iMacs in the corner for niche uses. iBooks and PowerBooks were good choices for laptop carts, because of their robust feature set and reliability. For example, their adoption of 802.11 was so much more reliable when that was new. Network printing too!
The worst compromise with buying Apple were the external floppy drives because they dropped support a little early. But that's an understandable compromise you could live with. We were trying to get students to quit floppys in the late 90s in favor of network storage anyway.
Apple has obviously lost the plot in education. They act like they don't care anymore. Like they have given up. Google is seeing that opening and exploiting the hell out of it. Whoever wins in education, wins an entire generation of userbase. Microsoft still understands that.
I do not think this approach is beneficial to them because it does not contribute nearly as much to their bottom line as do the consumer and enterprise sales. And by relinquishing the majority of educational marketshare to competition, they absolutely risk losing future mindshare and business for all of those students as you say.