Seven days from now Apple will be hosting an event in New York City at the Guggenheim Museum where they’ll be holding an “education announcement”, which we can only assume will be their entrance into the textbook market. If you read Walter Isaacson’s book Steve Jobs, you’re already familiar with Steve’s urge to disrupt the state of education in America. He spoke about how textbooks are too heavy, how they get out-dated too quickly, and how there are too many special interests involved when in fact it should be the teachers in control of what their students learn. When Apple launched the iPad two years ago, they also unveiled iBooks, which to be honest hasn’t been as much as a success as they probably thought it would be; Amazon dominates the eBook market. But what if Apple could start getting schools to buy their iPads in bulk and get teachers to tie their course material into iBooks? That changes the game completely. Plus you can only imagine how eager Apple would be to sell schools several thousand iPads at a time, with insurance thrown on top.
The big question is will we see any hardware announcements at this event? That’s a tough one to answer. Now would be the perfect time to introduce a lower cost 7 inch iPad to compete with the Amazone Kindle Fire, but such a product would surely have leaked by now. Apple could introduce an iPad that has just 8 GB of storage versus the current low end model that has 16 GB, but would such a move offer any dramatic price drops? Take the iPod touch for instance. It starts at $200 for the 8 GB model and then goes straight up to $300 for the 32 GB model. There is no in-between.
Anyway, we’ll find out soon enough about what’s what, so no need to speculate any further.
