The New iPad for Schools Is Here: Little Has Changed, and Eight Years On the Tablet Is Still Looking for a Reason to Exist

A new iPad that feels familiar, and cheaper — especially for students

Picking up the iPad Apple has just announced feels like using a product you already own.

Like the low-price new iPad released last year, it has nearly the same look, size, and weight. The same 9.7-inch screen, the same wide bezels. The processor got its routine one-generation bump — the A10 Fusion chip, the same one in the iPhone 7, faster than its predecessor but behind the iPhone X and the iPad Pro. In most apps, you won't feel the difference.

The iPad Pro's compact body, its True Tone display that shifts color with the ambient light, and its screen that refreshes 120 times a second are all absent. In exchange, the new iPad holds the same low price: unchanged in the US at $329 and up, or $299 with the education discount. In China it drops from 2,688 yuan to 2,588 yuan (2,388 yuan with the education discount), mostly because of the exchange rate.

The biggest hardware change from the previous generation is support for the Apple Pencil, a drawing accessory that until now worked only with the iPad Pro.

No breakthrough in hardware or in how you use it — just a cheap iPad that takes an Apple Pencil. And its first target is the education market.

At 10 p.m. Beijing time on the 26th, we arrived at Lane Technical College Prep High School in Chicago. The Apple staff on site wore green tops and yellow knit caps, the colors of the school uniform.

Apple rarely holds an event outside a dedicated auditorium or a convention center. More than 300 news outlets from around the world, along with some of the school's teachers and students, filled the ground floor of the auditorium.

The slides dropped Apple's usual cool, spare style too. They looked more like a blackboard, with the type and images animated to appear as if written by hand, the way a teacher writes on the board in class.

A cheap iPad suited to teaching, plus education software, would be the star of the show.

"This is an important day for Apple, and hopefully an important day for teachers and students around the world," Tim Cook said.

Apple's CEO has used lines like that on many occasions, but today he had reason to bring education up again.

After two high-priced iPad Pro models were updated in the middle of last year, the average price across the iPad line fell rather than rose by year's end — which means the cheaper entry-level iPad was selling more. Apple never managed to turn the iPad into a productivity device.

To keep the iPad growing, Apple needs a new market. The more price-sensitive education market is its target this time.

Why should students use an iPad? Apple's four answers: music, video, photography, and drawing

Apple spent 70% of the event on the operating system and the apps built for teaching — in other words, on telling you why students and teachers should use it.

Augmented reality came first.

Apple released ARKit last year to get developers inventing AR apps, but so far, apart from a few games people try once, AR has not found many more uses.

This time Apple argued that AR is a natural fit for the classroom. Teachers invited on stage took turns showing what it can do. Boulevard built an app for looking at paintings, carrying famous works into the classroom on an iPad so you can study them up close.

Another AR app, for dissecting a frog, drew the loudest reaction of the morning. The Apple Pencil doubles as a scalpel, and because the pencil registers pressure, you can cut open the frog on screen with a heavy or a light hand, like a doctor, and lift out its organs. A little gory, but convincing.

iWork, Apple's own office suite and long without an update, got a new version that supports the Apple Pencil throughout and adds several features. Pages can now lay out books, take hand-drawn marks and drawings on top of text, and hold images and video. Apple is also building a tool called "Smart Annotation" that lets a teacher write comments on a student's notes while the student is taking them.

The other announcement that drew cheers: free iCloud storage for the education market. The 5GB that comes free with an account is upgraded to 200GB at no charge.

American high schools do not usually give every student an iPad in class; three to five students normally share one. iOS, which holds only one user's data on a device at a time, does not suit that, so Apple built a new management system that lets one device carry several user accounts. Teachers get their own management tool, which can handle several hundred student accounts from a single device.

Schoolwork is the app Apple made for teachers to hand out materials, grade assignments, and check how far along students are. Apple stressed that Schoolwork keeps student data private: only the teacher can see it, and Apple itself has no access.

All of this software, the old iWork and the new Schoolwork alike, belongs to Apple's new curriculum program, "Everyone Can Create." The curriculum covers four areas: music, video, photography, and drawing. Apple is essentially casting the new iPad as a classroom tool for students to learn with and to express their own ideas.

The demo session after the keynote leaned toward software rather than hardware as well. Apple normally sets aside a single room where reporters can handle and test whatever it has just launched. This time it turned a whole floor of the school into an enormous demo space, classroom after classroom and activity room lined with long tables of iPads.

In two adjoining classrooms, Apple laid out an AR area, the Playgrounds coding game, and apps tuned for the iPad — Numbers, Keynote, Clips. The mood was made to feel like an ordinary elective: there were drum kits and similar gear around the room. At the iMovie area, teachers handed out costumes and set pieces; you could act out a short scene from lines on the iPad in front of you, then learn to cut the footage on the iPad.

AR was the technology Apple pushed hardest. The WWF's app shows you a river, lets you open and close a dam, and watch how the whole river changes.

In another classroom, we and more than 20 other reporters sat through a class of nearly an hour, taught by a real teacher rather than an Apple employee.

Every student had an iPad; the teacher could control them from the iPad in her own hands. Once an app was "handed out," a student's iPad locked into it — no going back to the home screen, no switching to something else.

In this math class, the teacher had us use Clips and GarageBand to make multimedia and to work out what the Fibonacci sequence is. Clips can cut together a narrated video much like a slide presentation, and the piece made in GarageBand helped explain what a "loop" is.

None of this is the most important part of daily teaching. It is there to help students grasp an idea, or to make a class more fun. In a classroom, the iPad's job is mainly to assist.

Next to the 10.5-inch iPad Pro launched last year, the new model has little hardware appeal: the bezels are much wider, and the screen is not laminated (put simply, the image on an iPad Pro appears to sit on the surface, while on the new iPad it looks like there is a layer in between).

This is a product made cheap and good enough for schools. Two years ago, "good enough" was exactly what Apple was trying to shake off.

The iPad's biggest problem, and the whole tablet category's, is that no one has to have one. It has already been repositioned twice

In 2010, when Steve Jobs sat on a couch and showed the first iPad to reporters, the iPad was the third choice between a phone and a computer.

Apple had opened the App Store less than two years earlier, and plenty of services — news, social networks, shopping — still lived as web pages rather than standalone apps, which made them awkward to read on a phone. Demonstrating the iPad, legs crossed in a couch on stage, Jobs opened Safari and clicked through bookmarks for The New York Times, Time, and other sites.

That said something about where the iPad stood at the time: a couch computer. In a November 2010 Business Insider survey of 500 iPad owners, web browsing, email, and social networks were the main uses. Ranked by average time spent, the order ran iPad, laptop, desktop, smartphone, and more than 35% of those surveyed said they preferred to browse the web on an iPad.

That difference, pitched just right, made the iPad a huge success from the start. In fiscal 2011 (April of the first year through the end of March the next) — the first full sales year after the launch — Apple sold 32 million iPads; by fiscal 2013 the figure had nearly doubled, to 71 million.

But the couch computer also gave people little reason to replace it. You do not need the semiconductor industry's latest work to read the news, browse the web, watch video, and play simple games.

Meanwhile internet companies, chasing more users, worked hard to fit their interfaces onto small screens. Complex web pages are still easier to read on an iPad than on a phone. But most mainstream apps had been optimized for phones well enough.

After a few hot years, iPad growth slowed fast.

Cook, who had taken over, saw the problem early and released the iPad mini in 2012 — 30% cheaper than the standard iPad and easier to carry — to spur growth. Between July and September 2012, iPad shipments rose 26% year on year. The lift lasted a year.

In the third quarter of 2013, the iPad had its first sales decline: units fell from 17 million to 14.6 million, and revenue dropped 30.5%.

In 2014, after Apple itself put out the larger iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, iPad sales collapsed.

Research from the market research firm Localytics found that by 2014 the model most in use among iPad owners was the iPad 2, three years old by then and without a Retina display. People were not willing to change their couch computer often.

Another study, by the consulting firm ExactTarget, found that in 2014, 65% of iPad owners picked up the tablet once a day, while watching television.

The couch computer had failed.

The problem was worse for tablets on other platforms. Microsoft went looking for a way out earlier, aiming the 12-inch Surface Pro 3 at creative work in 2014.

From that year on, Apple settled on the enterprise market as the iPad's new road.

In July 2014, Apple announced a partnership with IBM to move into enterprise mobility. IBM would build 100 enterprise app solutions for iOS and support them long-term on the back end; Apple would let IBM sell iOS devices with those apps preloaded, and provide AppleCare and after-sales support.

The next year Apple launched the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, which, in Cook's words, was "the biggest news for iPad since iPad."

A very large screen, the Apple Pencil, a dedicated keyboard connector — Apple cast the iPad Pro as the office computer of the future. Executives from Microsoft and Adobe, two companies Apple had been at odds with for years, came on stage to show new software they had written for the iPad.

But Apple still held to a finger-touch experience and did not do enough for the keyboard or the interface. In a series of tests QDaily ran at the time, the device could handle work including illustration and writing — but only in the sense that the job got done, not that it got done efficiently. That is not a reason to drop a Mac or a PC.

And in the second year of the iPad Pro, Apple did not follow up with new system-level support, which badly shook developers' confidence.

The iPad Pro briefly lifted the iPad's average selling price, a sign that more people were buying the expensive work tablet. The run did not last, and last year Apple went back to a cheap new iPad to rescue sales that kept sliding.

The third attempt is education, but that market is smaller than either the couch computer or the office computer

At yesterday's event Cook said, "We've put 40 years into education, and we care deeply about the education industry."

Counting from 1978, when Apple donated 500 Apple II computers to the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, Apple does have 40 years in education.

In the 1980s, the Macintosh was aimed at the education market when it first appeared. Later products, the PowerBook among them, also set out to win over students and teachers. Education, design, and publishing were among the few markets that kept Apple alive until Jobs returned in 1997.

Just as Microsoft's Surface probed the office market, this round in education was opened by Google. With Android tablets making slow headway, Google began pushing Chrome OS computers in the US and took this market — once held by Microsoft and Apple — quickly, on low prices and easy central management.

In the US alone, iOS plus the Mac still held about 35% of the education market in 2014, level with Chrome OS. By 2016 the gap had opened to 19% against 58%.

Price decided sales, and Chrome OS had a deep supply of cheap machines between $200 and $400.

In 2016 Apple started the "Everyone Can Code" program and the Swift Playgrounds coding app. Apple Teacher launched the same year, a platform that trains classrooms worldwide in Apple's technology; at today's event Apple said it now has 1 million certified teachers.

Since 2017 Apple has been pushing partnerships with schools. It works with Chicago Public Schools to offer coding courses to 500,000 students across the district, and this year 70 colleges and universities in Europe joined Everyone Can Code. China is in the picture too: on his visit last December, Cook toured Luwan No. 1 Central Primary School in Shanghai, where students learn to code on iPads.

The competition will not stop. One day before Apple's event, Google announced a partnership with Acer for a cheap tablet running Chrome OS, priced to the dollar like today's new iPad. Before that, Google had already pulled its own-brand Android tablets from its online store.

Education, K-12 education above all, has become the tech industry's newest position for the tablet.

But the market is not large. American high schools normally have three to five students sharing one iPad. According to a consulting firm's report, device shipments to the US K-12 education market, PCs and tablets together, came to 12.6 million units for all of 2016, roughly a tenth of the global tablet market that year. And by the World Bank's account, the US is already the largest education market there is.

This market may well carry the same problem: once bought, the thing does not need replacing for years.

From a new category with one on every couch, to an office computer on every desk, to an education computer shared by three to five students. Eight years after the tablet was born, it is still looking for a reason to exist.

Unless otherwise noted, the cover image and the images in the text were taken by the author.