Apple’s new iPad all set to take on Chromebook in Classrooms
Apple just launched a new iPad targeting the classrooms, where for long Google Chromebook and its educational apps ruled. This is an effort to make iPad once again popular among learners and students. The new iPad comes with several attributes that make it stand out competitively on several counts.
First of all, the new 9.7-inch iPad comes with a faster processor and support for Apple Pencil which was only supported by expensive iPad Pro earlier. This iPad is costing much less for the schools compared to the common market price further makes a value proposition for the company. Leave aside the price, even the features and gamut of education apps that the new iPad offers give it a competitive edge over the Chromebook.
The multimillion dollar student market is no small inspiration
All the major tech giants including Apple, Google and Microsoft are trying to grab the burgeoning education market by wooing schoolchildren with their product offerings. All of them are aiming these budding learners with the objective of turning them into lifelong loyalists to their brands by introducing their respective platforms early in the life of students. This school kid-focused new Apple iPad just echoes this effort.
Once the MacBooks and iPads used to dominate the American classrooms. But Google with its inexpensive and quite affordable Chromebooks just made a better value proposition for students who presumably look for affordability first. This is precisely why Apple is so serious this time to grab the students market with an iPad with price advantage as well as a gamut of learner-friendly features and apps.
Special offerings for school: pricing and others
The new 2018 version of the 9.7-inch iPad now comes with a special price tag of $299 for schools against the market price of $329 for general consumers. Although the price remains the same compared to the previous version, this positioning for students with a reduced special price for schools actually helps us understand the logic behind pricing. The Apple Pencil is also offered at a much-reduced price of just $89 for schools.
Apple also decided to give students more free cloud space for storage. Against the common free cloud storage space of 5GB which is available for everyone, Apple offers 200GB of cloud space for school students.
A brand new software for classrooms
Apart from the reduced price points and storage space offerings, Apple with this new 9.7-inch iPad also offered a completely new classroom software to help learners with their regular Schoolwork, tracking and creating assignments, and boosting productivity with a suite of other productivity apps integrated with it.
If this is not enough, the company also came up with a new student-friendly curriculum referred as Everyone Can Create which will give more scopes to students for nurturing their creative potential and skills in different activities ranging from music, art, video, photography etc.
What it offers under the hood?
Now coming down to tech specs, the new iPad 2018 comes with an awesome 8-megapixel camera. It offers 10 hours of battery life which is more than enough for running a full school day. It weighs only 1 pound and is ideal to slip in the school bag without needing to carry any extra weight. Powered with the A10 Fusion chipset, it will offer lightning-fast performance. It also comes with the Retina screen to deliver augmented-reality based apps to students like dissecting a frog in the virtual library right on your screen.
The new iPad offers many similar features that are available on the iPad Pro like the responsiveness to tilt and pressure along with a really high-sensitivity touch system. The new iPad coming with the Apple Pencil support will also boast of a whole array of student-friendly apps like Pages and Keynote. The Apple Pencil which is being offered for a reduced price of just $89 for the students can still be felt expensive by many, and for them, Apple along with Logitech just unveiled an affordable stylus called Crayon at just $49.
Takeaway
The new Apple iPad 2018 seems to be more value packed with a lot of advanced specs and student-friendly apps and features. It already seems to have all strengths upon its wings to make a better product than Chromebook and other tablets and laptops popular in American schools.
Dhruvil is a Writer & Marketeer for Nimblechapps, joined in December 2014, based out of Sydney, Australia. He has worked briefly as a Branding and Digital Marketing Manager before moving to Australia. At Nimblechapps, he worked on Social Media Marketing, Branding, Email Marketing and Blogging. Dhruvil studies Business at University of Western Sydney, and also handles Operations for the company in Australia.