Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

While Chinese parents are still wrestling with how to keep their children away from iPad, Apple and Google have made a fuss in the education market.

Perhaps when it comes to laptops or tablets, most people's reaction is that they belong to adult office entertainment or study. In fact, in the declining PC market, the demand in the field of education has been very strong. According to data from FutureSource, the K12 education hardware market in the United States alone is worth as much as $18 billion a year. In response to the needs of this market, Google has created an OS Chromebook that includes teaching management, online homework and other educational needs. Dell, Hongji and other manufacturers have launched related products. Not long ago, Google launched its own Chromebook product, PixelGo. At its 2018 spring launch, Apple also focused on the education market, offering iPad discounts for schools in addition to a series of software support.

What are the attractions of the education market for Apple and Google? What is the difference between the two ways of playing?

Why is the school the best customer in the hardware market?

In the past year of 2018, 15 million laptops with Chromebook were sold on the global market, and most of the buyers came from schools. This is already a very outstanding achievement in the PC market.

If we think of the "school" as a customer, we will find that this is an "excellent customer".

First of all, the school belongs to B-end customers, the purchase volume is very large, even if only for each teacher equipped with laptops, but also often dozens of sales quantity. In particular, the needs of educational scenes are relatively concentrated, requiring only simple online course system management, digital homework, video playback and other functions, with more emphasis on whether the product has a strong wear resistance, which can be used by wave after wave of students; and whether its battery life ability can support the use of full-time learning. This simple and closed demand also allows PC manufacturers to keep costs as low as possible. Chromebook products launched by manufacturers such as Dell sell for about $250, which can reduce the cost paid by the school.

At the same time, from the Chromebook model, the ultimate goal of notebook products and services is to promote the digitization of education, so that students can learn to use computers, finish homework on computers, and let teachers arrange teaching tasks on computers. In other words, manufacturers sell not only hardware to schools, but also software and technology solutions, and even cloud storage resources.

It can be seen that for technology manufacturers, selling hardware products to schools can not only obtain hardware revenue, but also sell software products, attract more users for their own products, and cultivate their own product use habits from an early age. Why not do such a good thing?

Not only that, the process of paperless education has been advancing, combined with AI, programming and other categories continue to enter the education plan, the school demand for hardware products, teaching software and cloud storage space will only continue to expand.

Apple in the Education Market

When we look back at a series of policies launched by Apple in 2018, we can see that Apple is not referring to the current stage of the education market.

What is the current stage of the education market? As you and I are familiar with, students submit documents and ppt assignments, and teachers take exams or manage scores online. To put it simply, the scope of the current ability of digital education lags slightly behind that of human-computer interaction, which is moving from the era of touch to image interaction and even sound interaction. But digital education is still just moving the content on paper to the screen, allowing students and teachers to use keyboard and mouse instead of pen and paper.

At this time, Apple showed a new model of digital education, emphasizing the creativity of stylus and the support of AR technology for education, in addition to the ClassKit used for course management, SchoolWork for learning management and iWork similar to GoogleDoc. For example, students can use Apple pencil to "dissect" animals, camera scans can show relevant parsing, and AR technology helps teachers explain and display geometry.

To be sure, what Apple shows is indeed our imagined future education. In addition to pen and paper, the digitization of more teaching materials allows students to understand the teaching content more intuitively. Teachers can also communicate more efficiently in the cloud platform.

With such a futuristic education solution, I believe most people's first reaction is whether they can land or not. October data show that iPad's decline in sales for 12 consecutive quarters may answer this question.

The reason for Apple's frustration in the education market is obvious. The future education plan shown by Apple is attractive, but it can only be implemented on the premise that it is widely used by students and teachers, and education tends to take into account fairness. Even if the price of iPad student version is reduced to $299, it does not have much price advantage compared with Chromebook. And the price of $299 is for students only, which means teachers have to buy at least one iPad or even a Mac to support their teaching work.

The true reaction of users can also be seen in the comment areas of some overseas media. Apart from believing that the cost is high and that parents and teachers cannot afford it, some people also propose that Google's school management system is relatively perfect, but it is too difficult to apply Google products in Apple's ecology.

Chromebook as the bottom line of educational digitization

Although it is very difficult for Apple to break ground in education, so does Chromebook, which already has nearly 60% of the K12 education market in the United States.

In the two OS developed by Google, compared with the raging Android, Chromebook used in the field of PC can be said to be crazily beaten by Apple and Microsoft outside the field of education in the United States. In China, for example, the computer rooms in colleges and universities or the computers used by teachers since childhood are all Microsoft or Apple systems.

This makes Chromebook leave a necessary impression of "low-cost netbooks" in the market, and in educational scenarios, it is also used to meet the most basic needs, such as teachers' entry scores and students' completion of simple digital questionnaires. Under the general trend of educational technology promotion, this is not optimistic. Everything Apple shows about creativity has nothing to do with Chromebook, but Microsoft is good enough.

In addition to the limited ecological development of software, Dell, Acer and other PC manufacturers also suffer from the lack of high-end Chromebook products, so they can only look for opportunities on the enterprise side. This time Google launched the high-end model PixelGo, which sells for up to $649, which is an attempt to expand the richer educational functions and is also a proofing for the high-end products of other manufacturers.

After all, under the development trend of educational digitization, rich application must be an important supporting ability. If you want museums to participate in digital education, you need developers to develop applications; if you want students to dissect frogs and mice in a flat plate, you also need developers to build content. If there are not enough users in the OS ecosystem, it is difficult to win the support of developers.

Concluding remarks

Apple and Google, one wants to cut off Hu's future, the other wants to consolidate their current advantages. It can be seen that in the world of technology, there has never been any kind of success that is absolutely safe.

What is more noteworthy is that education means not only the transmission of information between students and teachers, but also a huge scene in which hundreds of millions of students around the world spend eight hours in school every day. As big as the cloud construction of the entire school scene, as small as a teacher's IoT combination of multimedia equipment and lighting air conditioning, will eventually be input into a terminal.

At this time, iPad or Chromebook, which originally served teachers and students, would bring huge dividends to their respective camps if they could "incidentally" undertake this work. Perhaps this is the most important battle on the educational battlefield.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.