Comment by digikazi
10 hours ago
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.
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?
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.
The problem with competing against Chromebooks is that Chromebooks + GSuite and Google’s managed offerings for schools.
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.
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.
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My school, my college, and my current enterprise (Fortune 500, etc.) environment all manage it just fine.
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)
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.
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.
Apple absolutely needs a management layer, both for school and for family. Apple family controls are sorely broken.
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.
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My kids' school uses iPads with GSuite. It seems like a common config.
With Creative Studio Apple could even displace GSuite at some point.