The Chicago Apple Event for Education: many days late, a lot of dollars short

It is difficult to understate how badly Apple is losing in the US education market.

For most schools, Apple literally does not exist. They are the tree falling in the forest no one is there to hear, while Google runs roughshod, grabbing every last piece of market share and raising American youth on Google apps and Chromebooks.

Google dominates Apple in education because Apple is stupidly unwilling to bend its business model around the needs of the marketplace.

Education needs cheap solutions that work reliably. Apple doesn't provide those.

There are many, many, many other problems Apple has right now. But we can still go ahead and discuss this event today, even out of context.

The Good

1) Getting out of the Cupertino bubble. The move to Chicago and a public school setting was an excellent idea and gave the event credibility. Whoever's idea this was deserves a lot of praise.

2) Rolling out "Everyone Can Create," a new umbrella for Apple's various apps and tools designed to promote student content creation. Somebody woke up and realized "Everyone Can Code" is not relevant in any way to what the marketplace needs and is asking for. Good.

3) Emphasis on digital books. Apple has a competitive advantage with iBooks Author that they have not recognized and haven't acted upon, but today's news of rolling iBooks Author functionality to the iPad (over 6 years since iBooks Author was originally released) is welcome news. Today's youth want a home for the content they create, and while YouTube and Instagram are sometimes the appropriate vessels, often they need to create their own shell for the content, and digital books are the perfect opportunity for Apple to provide to them via iBooks Author.

The Bad

1) iBooks Author got integrated into Pages - it isn't a standalone app anymore, within iOS. Why on earth they would do that, I have no idea. Creates unnecessary confusion and takes a blowtorch to the legacy of the program, which is one of Steve Jobs' last things he ever worked on. Maybe they have plans I don't know about to cultivate the program more on the Mac end of things, though I doubt it.

2) No mention of the iBooks Store or other content delivery mechanisms. Apple has shown, the last few years, that they do not understand the importance of a working, vibrant iBooks Store experience within education. Students being able to take the digital books they create, and either monetize them or simply publish them in a public forum such as this, is a huge deal that Apple has never seemed to acknowledge or grasp or work on. The same continued today.

3) Calling the iPad "affordable" at $299 is dumb, given Apple's known business model of charging vast sums for accessories you don't know you need until after the fact. Mentioning the Apple Pencil, a frivolous, non-education-oriented accessory which retails for $89, in a setting like this, was especially tone-deaf.

Bottom Line

Today's Apple is incapable of surprising and delighting customers. They forgot how to listen and then respond, and then listen once more. They're a nest of bad corporate habits.

Today's youth are storytellers - they have things to say, and they need the technology they've grown up around to rise up and support them. For some, Alexa and other voice assistants have stepped up to fill that role, while as has been widely reported, Apple's own Siri is vastly behind and largely dysfunctional.

But with digital books and creating digital content, Apple still has that window of opportunity which other large companies haven't been able to shut on them. If this event today was a step toward moving that direction, then maybe Apple can become relevant in education again.

--------------------

Bradley Metrock created the iBooks Author Conference and produced it from 2015 through 2017, when his company, Score Publishing, acquired the large publishing conference/business Digital Book World. Digital Book World 2018, keynoted by Walt Mossberg, will take place October 2-4, 2018, in Nashville, TN. Metrock also hosts the popular podcast This Week In Voice, centered around voice-first technology, which is part of the VoiceFirst.FM podcast network.