“Apple Inc. won a $30-million contract Tuesday from the Los Angeles Unified School District, paving the way for the company to provide every student with an iPad in the nation’s second-largest school system,” Howard Blume and Teresa Watanabe report for The Los Angeles Times.
“The board voted 6 to 0 to authorize the purchase of the devices after senior staff lauded the iPad option as both the best in quality and the least expensive product that met the district’s specifications,” Blume and Watanabe report. “L.A. Unified will begin rolling out the devices to 47 campuses. However, by choosing Apple as the sole vendor, the district also made a de facto commitment to spend hundreds of millions of dollars with the Cupertino, Calif., digital giant over the next two years.”
Blume and Watanabe report, “New state and national tests will be taken on computers, and district officials don’t want students to lack the necessary experience with them… The district is paying $678 per device — higher than tablets available in stores — but the computers will be preloaded with educational software… Students will be able to take the computers home and controls will be included to limit undesirable content, such as pornography. Social networking sites will be available to students, with some limits.”
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“A Microsoft representative urged the board to try more than one product and not to rely on one platform. Doing so could cut off the district from future price reductions and innovations, said Robyn Hines, senior director of state government affairs for Microsoft,” Blume and Watanabe report. “But district staff countered that Apple offered the superior product. They also said that students and teachers often change schools and should not have to learn a different platform.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Welcome to the new world, Microsoft. The Post-PC world. This is Karma. Isn’t she gorgeous?! She says turnabout laced with boatloads of irony is fair play.
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