I have never been an Apple guy. I’ve never owned a Mac, always a PC. I’ve never owned an iPod, always some other .MP3 player (currently my non-iPhone smart phone is my .MP3 player). I don’t have Apple TV–I have a Roku player. And I was even a little resentful a couple of years ago when my older daughter saved up her own money and purchased an iPod Nano, because I knew that meant I was going to have to load iTunes software on my home computer. That’s right. I’m one of THOSE people.
I’ve never thought of Apple products as anything other than a way to spend MORE money to get what may appear cooler and slicker on the surface but what, when you got down to the nuts and bolts of it, was pretty much the same thing underneath. Apple lovers were the same people, I reasoned, who bought their coffee for $5 at Starbucks instead of making it for 20 cents at home, or the same people who spent $75,000 for a luxury SUV because it was “a convenient way to move the family around town” when THEY COULD HAVE BOUGHT A $30,000 MINI-VAN FOR LESS THAN HALF THE PRICE THAT HELD MORE PEOPLE, GOT BETTER GAS MILEAGE, AND HAD MORE CARGO SPACE!
Sorry. Didn’t mean to vent and go All Caps on you there for a minute…
What I’m getting at is this: I’ve never been Apple’s biggest fan. And when the iPad came out, I really just wasn’t interested. Wasn’t it really just a great big iPod Touch, I thought to myself? And $500? Wasn’t that just a ridiculous price to pay for something that was running on a limited, cell phone operating system? It couldn’t even run Flash, for goodness sake!
So when Amazon announced back in the fall that it was releasing a tablet of its own, the Kindle Fire, and that it was going to be only $199, I jumped at the chance to buy it. In fact, I ordered my Kindle Fire the morning that they went on sale, and I almost bought THREE of them (There are four members of my family, and I figured that–since we already had a desktop computer at home–purchasing three would make my family 1:1). Finally, I thought to myself, here was MY tablet. The affordable, reasonable, Kindle Fire: the family minivan of tablet computers!
And I was very, very satisfied with my Kindle Fire. In fact, I still am. I’ve written a LARGE number of blog posts about my Kindle Fire, and as a personal device I think the Fire is fantastic, both for consuming content (what it was intendend for) and as a nice little productivity tool that’s a lot easier to use than a cell phone or an iPod Touch.
Having said all that, I am writing this blog post on my district-issued iPad.
I didn’t “upgrade” willingly, mind you. I really didn’t have a choice. At the start of the 2011-12 school year my school district owned a grand total of zero tablet devices. Zero. None. Nada. We did have one principal, a first year principal who was hired to start our alternative school, who carried a personal iPad around with him and crowed to everyone about how great it was, but I mostly considered him a nuisance, and since we didn’t have transparent proxy on our network, there was a limit to what he could do anyway, so I didn’t worry about him too much.
Fast forward nine months to May 2 of 2012. We now have transparent proxy, and as of today, my district has 25 tablet devices, all in the hands of staff members (though that will change next year). 17 of those devices are iPads. All of the remaining devices are single unit testers of other tablet devices that have been tried and given up on. The iPad numbers will continue to grow while the others won’t, and my department is starting to be asked to support these devices, and I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to give the whole luxury SUV/minivan conceit as a reason why I didn’t know how the iPads worked. So about a month ago I broke down and purchased an iPad for myself and my network administrator. I cleaned off all of the productivity apps and the tinkering and customization I’d done on my Kindle Fire and gave it to my wife to use, and I’ve gone over to the Dark Side (Speaking of which, is it a coincidence that the color scheme of so many Apple products seems to mirror the Stormtrooper uniforms? I don’t think so. Those clones are all wearing iArmor!).
All kidding aside, though, I will say this about my iPad: After a couple of weeks of spending time with the thing, I understand what all of the fuss is about. Especially at the lowered $400 price point (That’s right. I purchased an iPad2, not an iPad 3. Remember, I’m a minivan guy!), the iPad is a terrific device. It can do so much more than the Kindle Fire. For me the biggest advantage is the screen size. And not because of the diminuitive size of webpages on the Kindle Fire, nor because of the difficulty clicking links on the 7 inch Kindle Fire screen. Those are both real issues, but MY 44 year old eyes only occasionally struggle to read text on the Kindle Fire web browser, and really–it’s not that hard to “pinch” the screen and adjust the size of the text if need be.
No, for me, where the screen size makes a real difference is when I’m trying to type. Because there is no way on the Kindle Fire to “pinch” the keyboard keys to make them larger, and I have a tremendously difficult time typing on the Kindle Fire keyboard, even when the screen is turned sideways. Actually, the correct word is probably ESPECIALLY when the screen is turned sideways. On the Fire’s 7 inch screen, the landscape keyboard is too wide to be comfortably used as a “thumbs only” keyboard like most smartphones, and it’s too narrow to work as a nine finger keyboard, whereas the iPad in landscape mode is ALMOST as easy to type on as a conventional keyboard. I could envision students writing an entire essay–heck, even a full research paper–on an iPad. It would be a frustrating affair on a Kindle Fire.
But if I’m being honest, that didn’t surprise me. I’d had just enough experience with an iPad, and with the similarly sized Lenovo Thinkpad, to already know that typing would be significantly easier on the iPad. That feature alone isn’t what has made me an iPad convert. The thing that has really blown me away about the iPad is the excellent apps that are available on it, two apps in particular. The first is Garageband. It’s a $5 app that puts an entire recording studio in the hands of the iPad user. And it allows people like me who have just the barest amount of musical background to sound almost professional. I can honestly say that–thanks to this app–I may never get anything productive ever done in my life again!
The second is iBooks, especially the textbooks that are inside of iBooks. The interactive nature of these textbooks really impresses me. Yes, the quality of some of the textbooks is a little questionable, but I’m looking at what’s currently in the iBooks bookstore as sort of a taste of what’s coming more than as something I should evaluate in and of itself.
All that said, I’m not rushing to my superintendent and making the case that we should be putting iPads in every kid’s hands. I’m not drinking the Apple Computer Kool-Aid. The iPad is great, but it’s not a perfect device. In fact, the thing that surprised me most about my iPad was not that it bested the Kindle Fire in many places, but that the Kindle Fire actually was better than the iPad in some ways. The Kindle Fire can handle Macromedia Flash, so it can run Compass Odyssey and Fast ForWord, two software programs that are heavily used for RTI in my district. The iPad infamously can’t handle Flash. More importantly, the Kindle Fire appears to my inexpert eye to be a MUCH sturdier device. It’s made with gorilla glass, and I’ve dropped it HARD on concrete three different times, and I can tell you that it looks like it might, indeed, take a gorilla to break that glass. The iPad, on the other hand, feels so flimsy to me that I’m pretty sure that I would have broken it at least one of those three times.
And then the question also has to be asked, do the iPad’s advantages merit the higher price tag, twice that of the Kindle Fire and similar devices? I’m not saying that it doesn’t. I’m not saying it does, either. And I don’t think there actually is a single answer to that question that’s going to apply to every classroom in every school in every district in the state. I think this has to go back to what I was getting at with the “Tablet Decision Maker” spreadsheet that I created and that’s available on my website at http://sweasytech.blogspot.com/2012/02/mobile-device-decision-maker.html . Before deciding if an iPad is the right tool and worth the extra money, the first thing that has to be determined is what is the teacher and what is the student going to DO with the device? If the teacher is planning to use a tablet mostly as an ereader and as an Internet research tool, then why spend the extra money on the iPad? A smaller tablet like the Kindle Fire or the Nook Tablet will do both of those things, and you’ll be able to get twice as many for the same number of dollars. On the other hand, if a teacher plans to do a lot of typing-intensive work with students, such as writing essays, or if the teacher plans to use a tremendous app like GarageBand, then the iPad is probably the way to go, even if it means you only will be able to purchase half of the number of devices.
It’s almost a classroom by classroom decision that has to be made.
But anyway, while you make that decision, I just wanted to say to all of my Apple advocates out there today–I understand, at least a little better, where you’re coming from.