Microsoft Debuts New Low-Cost Laptops and 'Classroom Pen' For Schools (geekwire.com) 90
Microsoft is doubling down on the education market, a competitive arena for the world's largest tech giants, with a series of new low-cost laptops and tools to help students and teachers work together. From a report: At the BETT education conference in London Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled seven new laptops and two-in-one tablets made by partners like Lenovo, Dell and Acer and a new Microsoft Classroom Pen designed for the smaller hands of kids. Starting at $189, the low-cost devices are designed to stand up to tough treatment of being dragged around in a backpack everyday. The seven new devices showcased today are: Lenovo 100e -- priced from $189, Lenovo 300e (2-in-1) -- priced from $289, Lenovo 14w -- priced from $299, Acer TravelMate B1(B118-M) -- priced from $215, Acer TravelMate Spin B1 (B118-R/RN) -- priced from $299, Acer TravelMate B1-114 -- priced from $319, and Dell Latitude 3300 for Education -- priced from $299. The pen is priced at $40.
But can it run Linux? (Score:2, Interesting)
The hardware looks nice, but I would like to opt-out from Microsoft indoctrination...
Can I run Linux on these (or any of the BSDs for that matter, even MacOS-X would be better)? Otherwise, they're just baggage my kid doesn't need.
Re:But can it run Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple used to have a lock on the educational crowd years back.
Apple used to have a lock on the artistic and creative types years back.
Now?
they seem to have their futures tied up believing everyone needs a brand new smart phone annually and will continue to buy new ones each time.
They keep sinking money into Apple TV...something that really hasn't taken off, compared to others.
They're forgetting one of the important things in the IT industry, GET THEM WHILE THEY"RE YOUNG!!
Seems Apple is just riding the fading energy engine that was left in motion by Jobs upon his passing.
They have a BIG pile of money they are sitting on, sure....but at some point, without new ideas, and keeping folks in your ecosystem (a great way is to raise kids using your OS and products)....at some point, that big pile of money won't matter and it will start vanishing too trying to keep above water at some point.
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Hell, I'm wondering why shareholders are NOT kicking Tim Cook to the curb??
Apple used to have a lock on the educational crowd years back.
Apple used to have a lock on the artistic and creative types years back.
Now?
they seem to have their futures tied up believing everyone needs a brand new smart phone annually and will continue to buy new ones each time.
They keep sinking money into Apple TV...something that really hasn't taken off, compared to others.
They're forgetting one of the important things in the IT industry, GET THEM WHILE THEY"RE YOUNG!!
Seems Apple is just riding the fading energy engine that was left in motion by Jobs upon his passing.
They have a BIG pile of money they are sitting on, sure....but at some point, without new ideas, and keeping folks in your ecosystem (a great way is to raise kids using your OS and products)....at some point, that big pile of money won't matter and it will start vanishing too trying to keep above water at some point.
Raise your hand if you really think any of these products will survive an entire school year.
There is a real lower-limit for a product's price, below which something's just gotta "give". And that "something"(s) are going to be hardware specs and reliability.
Mark my words: There will be a 50% minimum failure rate for these machines, with probably 15% never making it out of the box in working order.
I understand the sentiment behind "Get 'em while they're young"; but the days of school districts paying $1100 a
Re:But can it run Linux? (Score:4, Informative)
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We have about 10,000 of them in the district I work for. We pay over $400 for a Lenovo model with 360 degree hinge and touchscreen. They are some of the worst pieces of junk I've ever had the displeasure of working on. We've had quite a few issues with them (bad batteries, bad power switches, bad keyboards, etc..). I guess they are okay for people that want a very dumbed down computing experience.
Re: But can it run Linux? (Score:1)
Something of a surprise to this consumer was being told by the repairer "don't use your laptop on your lap, it's not designed for that".
My Lenovo touchscreen has a fault where the screen image pixelates and freezes the OS when two components within the device touch. It's like a short circuit. But the shell is so flimsy that any handling causes the laptop to distort from perfectly flat, and without perfect flatness on the screen or on the base, the bad contact happens. Even rethreading the wiring loom as it
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Toshiba built a laptop with a spinny hinge which is not garbage, the Lifebook T900. You can have combo multitouch+wacom or you can have wacom+daylight, but at the time you couldn't have multitouch+wacom+daylight which was sad. They are super thick by modern standards though, which is probably why they don't disintegrate. They also have a loud-ass fan which eventually warps and makes noise, and it's annoying to get in and replace it. It's less exciting in this era due to Intel Inside, though
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Yeah sorry I get them confused for some reason. The T900 has been hanging on through massive abuse, it's been dropped on the floor a ton of times
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They also use to have a lock on graphic work didn't they? I thought that was due to the hardware being better for graphics. But then, I thought that changed when they went with generic PC chip sets. This is not a statement, this is a question.
Wrong.
In fact, as any Amiga fan worth his salt will tell you, Macs actually had (for the most part) INFERIOR graphics to some other systems. And before Macs went PCI, finding hardware accelerated graphics boards was pretty damned difficult/REALLY expensive.
Apple was more popular for Graphics because they truly invented Desktop Publishing, and so software companies flocked to the platform with their Illustration, Drawing, Retouching, Publishing, and Web Design Applications. Therefore, for a long while (for a
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Hell, I'm wondering why shareholders are NOT kicking Tim Cook to the curb?? Apple used to have a lock on the educational crowd years back. Apple used to have a lock on the artistic and creative types years back. Now?
Now they're making tons of money on people with disposable cash buying nice-to-have items. They were doing okay, but Apple was never great at appealing to places with budgets like schools or companies. Sure, the marketing department used to get Macs but that was it. They absolutely don't want to compete with $200 Chromebooks. They're running the same Intel/AMD/nVidia chips as everyone else, maybe you prefer macOS but inside Photoshop it's the same. The "new Apple" begin with the iPod, where they learned coo
Wasting people's time while making money! (Score:4, Interesting)
While there's been a number of articles touting the benefits of technology in the classroom, the disadvantages are immense and not worth the investment That's why, pupils from the so called 3rd world thrive when they come over to "technologically advanced" classroom environments. They demonstrate an understanding of the academics better.
This leads me to one conclusion: Nothing beats the old fashioned [pen and paper] way of learning.
Microsoft cannot agree with me on this. Heck, they want to sell more and more gadgets. They want to make money, and lots of it. I will point those who support technology to debunk this piece [university...rkhelp.com]
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Technology in schools was always about sales and never about education.
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Actually it is well documented. Technology in he classroom has proven to disrupt learning not enable it. The higher cognitive functioning technology was suppose to allow has not materialized. In fact the use of technology has shown students regress in simple tasks.
Technology in schools was always about sales and never about education.
100% sincere request: I haven't read any studies that proved this either way, so if you have citations, I would be very interested in reading them.
That being said, I don't think it was a matter of tech can alter brain chemistry, so much as the fact that there are things that can be demonstrated in an interactive environment. For example, allowing students to use drag-and-drop interfaces for math, or make things disappear to improve simplicity in visualization, or using colors to separate nouns and verbs in
Performance of these laptops? (Score:2)
For our business, I've had to test out low-end Win10 machines to work with our software. I've been generally surprised at how sluggish these laptops (2-4GB DDR and 32-64GByte SSD) come up as well as bring up and run applications. Will these computers offer better performance or do you really need a system with a 2+GHz clock and more than 5GB of DDR?
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Not sure about the Windows ones, but I bought a chromebook with 4GB RAM for my kid similar to these low end laptops and I was quite impressed with the speed and functionality.
I think that if they put an actual SSD in these machine as opposed to EMMC (SSDs are ridiculously cheap now), and 4 GB of RAM, then these machine should run pretty well. Most tasks don't require high end CPUs. I have a 10 year old machine with 4GB ram and I put an SSD in there and it just flies for basic tasks
Chromebooks are different beasts (Score:2)
Personally, I am quite impressed by how Chromebooks operate (not so pleased with Google's treatment of user data) but not so much when you get the same (literally) hardware running Win10 - I compared an Acer Chromebook with Win10 machine with identical specs, processors, etc. They were the same machine except the covers are different colours.
There seems to be a lot of bloat that keeps the Windows Machines from running at what I would consider a decent speed which is why I asked the question to see if there
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Chromebooks Apps are different beasts (Score:2)
You're vastly oversimplifying Chrome Apps - our app (Jade Support https://chrome.google.com/webs... [google.com]) is very full featured with Javascript based UI, WebAssembly Compilers and Bluetooth Communications. User data is from GDrive (and soon also to allow OneDrive) which uses up the bandwidth you're talking about.
But a lot of work is being done at the thin client level and it performs very well - especially when you compare it to Windows apps written in C++ doing the same function on a platform with the same pro
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I wonder how much of this is due to slow I/O. I've noticed that machines that would have been fine 5 years ago are terribly slow because they don't have an SSD. As soon as you put in an actually SSD, many of the performance problems seem to disappear. I think they've completely stopped optimizing their operating system for anything that doesn't have an SSD.
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The Acer systems that I was testing were identical, 2GB DDR, 32GB SSD, Celerons.
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A quality EMMC is good enough for daily use. In fact, for everyday use I could get away with a good uSD card — we expect the random write performance to vary widely and it does, but we might not expect how much the random read performance varies [pidramble.com]. I found Samsung Evo+ to have the best, which jibes with what the above link says. I came upon that information via the Pine64 forums originally, though, not through the raspi community. Supposedly the 16GB (or was it 8GB?) and above models of both the Evo and
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Microsoft will not wine and dine administrators, Microsoft doesn't sell these devices, except possibly in their Microsoft Retail store.
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Well, how much are they charging for windows on that platform. I thought that sort of price double dealing, free in one market, pay everywhere else was illegal, a monopolistic action designed to drive out competition and once lock in achieved, well the OS goes back to costing more than the hardware and no other software yet. Does this not subject them to an anti-trust suit, should they fail to make their OS available at similar prices in other markets. Keep in mind, they also take out the invasion of privac
Microsoft in Schools (Score:1)
I'm a teacher, I've taught at several school. Bay Area schools are transitioning from having computers available, to all students being issued one of these cheaper laptops. The hardware is basically irrelevant for students. Literally the only thing students do on their computers is open a web browser, either for Google Office or for Google Classroom. Or to try to get away with gaming LOL. There is functionally no difference between Chromebooks and Windows.
Admins say the Google and Microsoft tools are f
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The cost savings come from reducing support costs to effectively zero. (chromebooks) By not paying for more, better educated support techs to help with administrating the Apple machines they are saving money and staff and time.
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Managing Chromebooks is "effectively zero" (effort? cost?) - so when a school district rolls out 1,200 chromebooks they simply manage themselves? They repair themselves?
I think not.
I suspect you think because your personal chromebook is zero maintenece, you imagine 1,200 would be just as easy to manage.
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I don't own a Chromebook as I don't have a use case for one. I have however consulted for educational software/technology companies. You can do your own TCO analysis without being a pedant. It effectively reduces suport costs and TCO by 61-71% over a three year life-cycle.
I based my comment off of the direct feedback from those who administrate and use Chromebooks in their school/teaching districts, as well as direct conversation with VAR's in the field.
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One is a souped up web browser and the other a piss poor OS
Hmm. Maybe they are not so different.
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> What the hell is Fortnight?
NOT Fortnight, but Fortnite. [epicgames.com] The parent spelt it correctly.
It's the latest fad in gaming. I've discussed [slashdot.org] it before [slashdot.org].
Are you new to /. because there have been a few stories about it?
* Fortnite Hits 8.3 Million (Or 0.1% of Human Population) Concurrent Players [slashdot.org]
* Fortnite Was 2018's Most Important Social Network [slashdot.org]
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Didn't do so great with Android.
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That honestly wouldn't be a big leap for them, as they already have their own Red Hat Linux clone called Amazon Linux for AWS server instances. They even have a GUI front-end for it that you can use with Amazon WorkSpaces instead of Windows.
Underpowered (Score:2)
You will get one tab opened, and that will be it.
Maybe M$ just wants kids in their systems sooner and sooner.
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Laptops are free, like printers (Score:2)
Hundreds of students using Win10 devices, managed by some Active Directory server in the back end? Cost of sys admin, cost of server, cost of server security upgrades .... No wonder they are giving crap machines for free.
Win10 plays poorly on low end machines. I bought a cheap win10 for exclusive use as VPN work from home machine. That dog could not even manage that simple thing well. Amount of disk thrashing it does, ... 8 GB n
These aren't new (Score:2)
This just the same old same old. You have been able to pick up $200 laptops for years.
The problem is that they are practically unusable as they are very sluggish and have no space for anything.
They're just intended to be terminals limited to a walled-garden internet.
Schools would be far better off doing what they used to do which was has a computer lab and dedicated computer time on actual computers. Instead of trying to give every kid their own worthless device because that's all the school can afford.
On
Will a Sharpie work? (Score:2)
Well it will at least once...
Awesome! (Score:2)
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Bring back netbooks because they worked before. (Score:2)
These look like a rehash of the old Netbook PC's from the Mid 2000's. Cheap Low End laptops. They had limited success because the economy in 2008 was bad. So people needed a cheap device. However shortly after that with the growth of the iPhone and Android Competitors which offered strong competition people found that their mobile devices, could do the same thing as their netbooks could do, but actually better, because the software was written to work for the slower systems.
Now Google has success (in Ame
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Netbooks failed because they initially only ran Linux, and to run Windows was expensive (50%, $100 upcharge for Windows). By the time the system performance caught up to the demands of Windows, the market was already burned on "netbooks" .
They were also upgrade-limited to 2 Gigs of RAM, by the time 4 Gig RAM was available, the market moved on - to low cost full-size laptops in the sub-$300 range.
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And the procs weren't great. I recently retired one. Eight years in, perfectly functional, 2lbs, $200@purchase. Actually bought it instead of an iPod.
Looked up the proc on some benchmark site where 100=non-overclocked current fastest thing.
It got a 3. Despite that, it was nearly usable running lxde. Nearly, but not quite.
Been replaced by a refurb'd x230, but I still sorta miss it.
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These look like a rehash of the old Netbook PC's from the Mid 2000's. Cheap Low End laptops. They had limited success because the economy in 2008 was bad. So people needed a cheap device.
I loved my netbooks at the time, but shortly after that time you started to need large amounts of RAM to surf the web, and they didn't support that. They also don't have hardware to accelerate the video codecs being used today, so they struggle to display full-screen video. I still use some for certain tasks, like OBD-II scanners or what have you.
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The difference between a chromebook and a netbook from the mid 00's is that the chromebook runs a very lightweight OS optimized as a thin client to Google's services. The Windows version of this is a dog because Windows isn't a lightweight OS and can't possibly run as a thin-client to a windows cloud.
Microsoft is scared Shitless of how well Chromebooks have penetrated the K-12 education market. Chromebooks almost entirely dominate the K-12 sector at this point. Kids learning to use chromebooks means kids of
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people found that their mobile devices, could do the same thing as their netbooks could do
No they didn't, rather, they found that they don't do a whole lot with their netbooks other than messaging and media consumption. A computer is actually capable of considerably more.
It's a trap [nt] (Score:1)
Lenono 300E - write on the screen with a #2 pencil (Score:2)
I wonder how writing on the screen with a real pencil works???
Is it Atom? (Score:2)
Is it Atom? If so I'll pass. Atom performance just sucks.
Ryzen APU please. When they come out later this year, then Ryzen 7nm APU please.
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Low power 7nm ryzen/vega APUs will be fine. Basically keeping my wallet closed until they land.