With the financial constraints of most public schools, they probably have to pick one of the two. "However, that profit margin is a key component of Apple's success, allowing Apple to constantly reinvest in the brand, driving innovation and R&D across hardware, software and content development." Apple could also make cheaper laptops with plastic cases and cheaper CPUs, but making mass quantities of cheap hardware doesn't seem to be part of Apple's current strategy. Given the choice between a $300 iPad and Chromebooks that start at $150, it'll be hard for schools to pick the former over the latter. Sure, one has sleek and powerful apps, but the other has a keyboard, with all the important functionality, for a cheaper price. At the end of the day, Apple has stuck to its guns as a purveyor of high-end electronics.

Apple hasn’t always shown the kind of love for the iPad that it has done for its much more successful cousin the iPhone, but this day was the iPad’s day to shine, and that’s an important day in any product’s life. Once the domain of the iPad Pro, the $99 Apple Pencil ($89 for education!) is now open to owners of the low-cost sixth-generation iPad. In a partnership that dates from the early days of the iPad Pro, Apple continues to partner with accessory maker Logitech to build products that Apple wants to exist, but not necessarily enough to build itself. From Apple’s perspective, the entire day was about telling why Apple’s stuff is worth the extra money, as well as playing catch-up with some administrative tools and cloud storage quotas that lag well behind what Google offers to schools. In one of the demonstration classrooms at the school on Tuesday, above the many iPads showing off Swift Playgrounds and ARKit and other features, was a mezzanine full of iMacs, more than a dozen of them all in a row, presumably being used with Final Cut or Logic or other high-powered media applications.

The city and the tech company announced a partnership in December to teach coding to CPS students. Apple launched a new iPad with refreshed apps at Chicago's Lane Tech High School in order to appeal to more teachers and students, March 27, 2018. (Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune) Apple launched a new iPad with refreshed apps at Chicago's Lane Tech High School in order to appeal to more teachers and students, March 27, 2018. The iPads are available to order Tuesday starting at $299 for schools, the same price as the current model and more expensive than many Chromebooks, some of which sell for less than $200. The new technology Apple announced at the event sounded exciting, Alpasan said, but as a senior, she doubts she’ll get a chance to use it.

It is the same $99 accessory with a slight break for educators that was previously reserved for the far more expensive ($649 on up) iPad Pro. On the way is a stylus from Logitech called Crayon, which costs just $49. It doesn’t do everything Apple’s own Pencil does—it isn’t pressure-sensitive, for example—but it can otherwise let students handle some of the same drawing and note-taking tasks. The 9.7-inch Retina display size on the new iPad is the same as last year’s model. To nurture creativity, the company announced new curriculum under the Everyone Can Create umbrella, still in preview, with a focus on music, video, photography, and drawing.

It has the same basic 9.7-inch screen size, bezels, Touch ID sensor, button placement, and cameras. The air gap on the screen is the same as before — large by iPad Pro standards, but only iPad Pro people will really turn their nose up at it. Same goes for the screen overall, which doesn’t have all the True Tone magic of the Pro, but is nevertheless vibrant and responsive. The demo areas here at Lane Tech aren’t really focused on the hardware, instead it’s a ton of different software demos all focused on the classroom. The point of the new iPad is Apple’s updated software suite, which includes new versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote that support the Apple Pencil.

Apple hosted a low-key event on Tuesday in Chicago focused on the educational market, where it revealed an updated iPad and a suite of software for classrooms. Chrome is now the leading operating system in the US with nearly 60% market share, according to Futuresource Consulting. It's also not as popular as the iPad in many other international education markets, according to Larry O'Connor, CEO of Other World Computing (OWC), which provides services for Mac users. "Apple is renowned for creating products that the users use but the data is private. He said the ease by which teachers can shuffle content students and the screen at the front of the classroom is important when annotating students' work or projecting illustrations on a screen.

Apple is rolling out a new educational app and giving away extra online storage to teachers and students in an attempt to reclaim some of the ground that it has lost in U.S. Apple is adding the ability to use a digital pencil to draw and write on its cheapest iPad model in an attempt to make the tablet more compelling for creating, teaching and learning. Some of those so-called Chromebooks sell for $200 to $250 while the cheapest iPad currently costs $329. Apple is hoping to return to the head of the class in the competition to get high-tech products into U.S. Some of those so-called Chromebooks sell for $200 to $250 while the cheapest iPad currently costs $329.

Apple revamped its 9.7-inch iPad that supports Apple’s stylus, the Pencil. Apple also did not reduce the price of its Pencil stylus (which is still $99), but did announce that Logitech is making a stylus called the Crayon which will work with iPads, and starts at $49. Apple said that teachers and schools will be able to get them for a discounted rate of $299. It focused mostly on the new version of Pages, where teachers can make textbooks for their students directly on an iPad, as well as mark up documents using an Apple Pencil. It builds on the Everyone Can Code curriculum it previously launched to encourage students to learn to code.

The device will compete with Google's low-cost Chromebooks and comes with a pencil accessory. Apple is going head-to-head with Google in education, a market the iPhone maker helped pioneer but has let languish. Apple also introduced an education service called Schoolwork, which will compete with Google’s Classroom software. Apple executive Greg Joswiak called the new iPad “faster than virtually any Chromebook” during an event Tuesday at a Chicago school. The company also said Apple student accounts through schools will get 200 gigabytes of iCloud storage for free, compared with the regular 5 gigabytes.

But the iPhone maker isn’t content to lose out on a payday that could be worth as much as $40.9 billion by 2022. The company’s Classroom software allows teachers to control their students’ iPads, locking them into specific apps and muting their speakers remotely, while Swift Playground helps kids learn how to code using Apple’s Swift programming language. I got a chance to check out Apple’s new AR software in action during the company’s iPad event at Lane Tech College Prep High School in Chicago, and genuinely wish I had similar technologies available when I was in school. During one demo at the event, an Apple employee showed how science teachers can use AR to see the layers of a frog’s anatomy as if they were being pulled back in real time all the way from the skin down through the muscle and bones and to the circulatory system. Adding to the experience was the fact that I could move the iPad closer to the virtual frog to get a closer look at individual organs like its heart to get a more detailed view of how they function.