Budgets aside for a second, I’d love to trade my Macbook in for an Air. A few reasons why:

- I personally haven’t used an optical drive in several years. (Ben – what do your teachers use them for?)
- Goodbye plastic case (Ben – Don’t yours break/crack?)
- SSD will improve running speeds of many activities much more than a faster CPU (Ben – How much do you spend replacing drives each year?)
- Battery life should be a bit better and it’s actually cool enough to put on my lap without getting burned
- New technologies such as Thunderbolt which makes it easy to use in heavier-duty multimedia environments (no iMacs required?).

You’ve already mentioned the downsides. HD capacity would be my only worry, but it actually forces students/teachers to publish on the web and delete – not a bad practice in a school setting. (e.g. I’ve been shooting and editing video on a 16GB iPad for many weeks without a worry.)

Ben – you’ve advocated strongly for 1:1 netbooks + macbook carts. Does this development change that recipe? How about abandoning the carts and putting the extra money toward higher-spec netbooks? Or?

Bottom line is- more money and less stats, even on paper, put people arguing for Macs in a hard place.

The MBA is a deceptively powerful machine, even in its lowest spec. 64Gb may be an issue but server storage / USB drives / cloud storage should offer flexible solutions.

What do they use on DVD? Haven’t used a disc for years!!

Wireless should surely be a priority, tethering a laptop does seem daft. We’re investigating a solution called Ubiquity Unifi, which at first seems to good to be true on price, but initial tests are very promising.

I have been frustrated by this as well. While I understand Apple might envision a shift toward iPads as a replacement for laptops as student devices, it does feel like that is being forced upon us with the removal of the MacBook, which has been the affordable “sweet spot” in schools for some time now. The 13″ MacBook Pro is a great laptop, to be certain. But you are spot-on in pointing out the $250 price delta as an obstacle for schools–many of whom are working with SMALLER budgets than they were 3-4 years ago. It leaves you in the unenviable position of having to explain why you shouldn’t purchase almost twice as many Windows laptops for the same amount of money. Apple has proven me wrong before. I hope, for many increasingly urgent reasons, it does so again. Soon.

I don’t see that Apple is going away from the education field at all. They have been framing the iPad as central to a next-paradigm of computing for the education set, as well as most other general computing. Yes, shifting like this for them would be painful. The standard for ease of use, administration, and even creativity was an Apple device and a keyboard. However, they have moved their own paradigm from keyboard-needed (for all computing) to keyboarding needing to bring something to the table that improves the experience of computing beyond “just another input mechanism.” This shift isn’t friendly to educators who are themselves slower to change such a core behavior, especially when the software and policies also fit this.

I don’t think that Apple is going away. I do think they are asking the,selves, and educational facilitators, if the MacBook was conductive to the best practice for how Apple sees education. Not that the way you see it is wrong, but their vision guides their products. Your vision guides your behaviors. Big difference.

I wonder. And this is just a wonder. Are those same reps who give you product also helping you to revitalize your educational tools, behaviors, and experiences around Apple’s vision for computing? Or, are they just pushing a product? If the former, you should expect more encouragement to see thing like iBook Author, and various other apps and services pushed more towards your solution; making the device less important, and later not at all important to your goals (preparing kids for the world in which they will graduate). If the latter, maybe it’s the education industry which needs to move away from itself to something more fulfilling the goals of what education actually sells.

I’m going to run some reports to figure out how much of our HDs are currently being used. I want to see if there’s some way to gather similar data about processor cycles and RAM allocation. I’m not sure we can get that.

My belief is that we over-provide for most teachers. I’m curious to see if that’s true. I always wanted to harvest all those idle processor cycles . . .

I don’t think that helps you with your problem but assuming you’ve got the infrastructure to do it, that kind of data might be worth considering.

I think I’d be alright with paying the same amount, even for seemingly lower specs. I’m assuming a solid state drive balances out some RAM, lowers repair rates, better battery life etc.

I’m not thrilled but I’m not despondent either.