Natasha Singer via Michael Tsai:

The public school system in Eudora, Kan., for instance, used to have rolling carts of iPads for elementary school classrooms and MacBook carts for older students to share. But last year, when administrators wanted to provide a laptop for each high school student, the district bought 500 Chromebooks at about $230 each.

[…]

To compete with Chromebooks, Microsoft announced last month that it had worked with Acer, HP and Lenovo to develop low-cost Windows laptops for schools, with prices starting at $189.

This is sounding like a familiar refrain, but it seems like either Apple doesn’t care about this market or it completely misjudged its needs. I haven’t used a Chromebook, but at least on paper it seems like a near perfect machine for education: great price and durability, a real keyboard, a larger screen than on Apple’s cheaper devices, cloud-based productivity apps, and little need for administration. In some cases, students would need the full power of a Mac or PC, but for most education uses they don’t.

As a user of the candy-colored Macs in school and a developer on Apple platforms, it saddens me to hear Apple’s performance in this market. Education and design have been Apple bastions for a decade, I wish the relationship would continue. This is especially interesting in light of Apple’s new ad campaign for iPad Pro, going with the line that it gets “no PC viruses.” Google have been addressing that market need in another way, Chromebooks have the advantage of coming pre-installed with spyware!

Here’s Dan Moren on the latest news on WWDC:

Well…didn’t see that one coming. Apple’s announced that the 2017 incarnation of its Worldwide Developers Conference will be held from June 5 through June 9, but not in its usual home at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Instead, the event will take place at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, about an hour south of the city.

I seem to recall Tim Cook saying something to the effect of, “see ya next year in the spaceship!” I wonder if things got delayed and bridges were burned at Moscone West, leading to this decision. Given the proximity to Campus 2, I wonder if any events will take place there.

Michael Cohen at TidBits, via 512 Pixels:

I cannot see into the heart of Apple to judge the depth of its love for iBooks, but, from external appearances, whatever affection it has seems to become ever more shallow with each passing release. And, for an ebook lover like me, that is heartbreaking.

iBooks is not without its problems, though I find it vastly superior to the Amazon Kindle app and I find it generally quite reliable for reading ebooks. The number of free books on the iBooks store is also appreciated.