.... Apple makes all its money selling hardware, so they don't want things repaired or upgraded, they want the sheep to buy the "new" one, which is usually pretty much the same as the old one.

Same here in the UK. There is also zero persistence. Children are pretty much encouraged to screech for help at the first hint of a problem. Following instructions is terrible. Nuclear Power is my favourite example. We learnt about things like alpha and beta and gamma radiation, energy released by nuclear fission of certain elements and so on. We knew - sort of - how a Nuclear Power station worked. Nowadays they can tell you all about the environmental effects and so on but have no clue what is actually going on. We knew radiation was dangerous ; our Physics teacher keeping his sources in lead lined boxes on the end of a long pole kinda gave it away.

Coding for minimal systems avoids waste. I started off with 256 bytes of RAM. Lucky me. What it teaches you is that resources ; CPU time, memory, storage are finite. You cannot just scrawl it in Java or C#, chuck things around like there's no tomorrow and sulk about the garbage collector or insufficiently powerful computers when it runs like a dog. Many times as a professional I had to sort out messes written by theorists, who were using ridiculous amounts of memory or slow algorithms. BASIC has many defects, but it can be a *lot* better. You American folks mostly had Ataris and Commodores. We in the UK were moving towards more structured BASICs like the BBC Micros, which still wasn't fabulous but had long variable names, procedures with parameters, locals, repeat loops and so on. No real data structures, but far closer to Pascal than the CBM 64s BASIC was.

Maybe, but a lot of people typed in programs and then wondered how they could make their own animations ...

But they've also gone up. I'm British, but there is a big difference between children today and those in the mid 80s when I started teaching. There's an instant gratification requirement combined with a desire to persist. So for example, when I started, you could produce a list of instructions on (say) how to program, a bit like some of the BASIC manuals and virtually all the kids could do it. Some might get it slower than others, some might zoom ahead, but they all had the concept of 'reading and following instructions'. Now, it's a minority, you get choruses of things like "what do I do ?" and other demands, which are really about limiting effort i suspect. They've probably learnt from parents and early schooling that if they whine they will be helped rather than being encouraged to persist at a task. Most non teachers of a certain age would be amazed how inefficient education is in terms of time spent learning things.

It's the exams taken in their final year of mandatory schooling, they are about 16 or so. Above 16 there are different options. Most UK schools do ICT (Information Communication Technology) which has all the hard computing bits taken out (literally). More Computing was done when we had the old BBC Model Bs (a computer roughly as powerful as a C64).

Three possibles. One, the specification was leaked for the task, two the sample data was leaked, and three model answers were leaked. It doesn't mean it's done for you, but it means you can do it at home, have people check it, figure it all out, and then reproduce that in the actual test.

True story. I used to post on the TES forum (TES = UK Education Newspaper). One year there was a problem with the "AS Level" IT exam (AS level is done by 17 year olds roughly, it's the level above GCSE). None of the teachers could do it (it was an Access database). Literally. Slightly worrying when they are supposedly teaching students to do it, but that's the standard of UK "Computing". To be fair it was an insanely stupidly designed question (and about half of it was drivelling on about green issues which were irrelevant to the problem). I created two sample working databases, different approaches same problem, which I shared with teachers (it had to be to a teachers email in a school email address for obvious reasons). I ended up getting deluged with questions from students asking for all kinds of help , bizarrely the most common was "how do I memorize this". From all over the country. None of them should have seen the question let alone the answer. I don't know who leaked it. I understand that such is commonplace. Cheating is rampant.

Double the price ??? Where you getting your phones from ? Might be the UK of course, but an iPhone 7 here is £599, last Chiphone I bought (Cubot Dinosaur) cost me about £100. If you just want a simpler phone (this one has a big screen and battery, it's nearly a mini tablet) you can get a decent phone for half that. Apple are stuffed when the population realise they are scamming them big time. It used to be seven or eight years ago (say) that there was a noticeable quality gap between iPads/iPhones and the chinese equivalents. Now there pretty much isn't, or it's barely noticeable.

Don't see the point. I'm sure China makes Android phones which closely resemble iPhones, so just buy one and put it in a case if you want to be able to jerk off to other people about having iJunk. If you want the full Apple experience burn £700 of notes.

How does it do this ? What Apps actually run on a watch ? There's the obvious notification apps, which are all pretty much the same, relaying information to your watch from your phone. You could use it to control music on your phone. There's alternative clock faces, some with info, some just gimmicky things. What other apps in the app store are there going to be ? People aren't going to play games on it. You can't do anything creative on it.

Indeed. The value of a Rolex or whatever is not established when you buy it ; it's established when you sell it. A Rolex can last a long long time - mine is 30 years old - and if it stops working I can have it repaired. It still has a value. Apple Watches - almost certainly superceded in 18 months (if it doesn't sink), useless in 3 years (if not already), and I wonder if you can "replace the mechanism". Plus the thing is useless anyway. I've a Pebble, day to day wear. Does the notification and telling the time thing great (and always displays the time). Battery lasts a week. It would drive me utterly mental to have to charge it twice a day. (what "up to 18 hours" actually means)

I think he's using VB6 (hence the comment about 2005). If he knew what he was talking about, the argument would be that VB.Net is a non-scary language because it doesn't use either curly brackets (C#) or indentation blocks (Python) which can sometimes be confusing for average pupils age 14 with little or no experience of programming at all. Whilst VB.Net is really a bridge you can do almost everything you can in C# (and a few things you can't, optional named parameters for example). Plus IME an extraordinary number of schools still use VB6 or similar because it allows them to meet the exam specifications without much effort at all, it's easy to knock out something 'impressive' to the uneducated (exam boards and moderators). It's not clear because he's clueless. Python is 'based on C' is it ? I can see very few similarities at all, does he mean 'written in C' ? Python cannot 'do more complex constructs' than C ?

Firstly, I'm both a qualified teacher (PGCE, the UK teacher training qualification) and a developer (BSc (Hons) Comp Sci, MCPD) in the UK. So I have a foot in both camps. It is obvious that this bloke, like most teachers of "Computing" in the UK has no clue. "It is true that Microsoft stopped programming in Visual Basic in 2005, however they did not stop programming in derivatives of this language and developing the software to program in visual basic, meaning as a foundation language it is perfect for introducing complex programming constructs." anyone with a clue would be fully aware that there is no real comparison between VB6 and VB.Net in anything other than the most Basic (ahem) syntax. VB.Net is really a syntactic sugar for C# but the whole, well, almost everything is completely different. Yes, there's a hack library which sort of works a bit. Now, in answer to the question any developer would ask "WTF are you teaching a thirteenth rate Basic language" ; there are various reasons. The teacher can't really program, doesn't understand OOP, Modular programming, Event programming or how .NET works (they will complain endlessly about strings not being mutable first class variables for example) and they really don't understand why Quick Basic is awful and totally unsuitable for future learning. But the real reason is this. Nobody else in the UK education system knows much about computing either. So the idiot examiners look at a Windows Form with some buttons on which does something vaguely (say a simple calculator) and they think (and score) as if this is some big programming achievement rather than just dragging and dropping a couple of objects and typing a couple of lines of code (probably copied) in. If they'd done it the way they did when I started (WinMain, message pump, create window etc.) then yes it would be an achievement. It's a bit like those 'impressive' Wizards for things like .NET which turn out a form with querying, sorting and so on all built in. They haven't really 'coded' anything, they've just clicked a couple of buttons. But it ticks boxes, the fact that it's just zero effort or understanding, nobody cares. UK examinations are about achieving this with the minimum of effort with zero interest in whether what is taught is useful or developmental or not, so in that sense VB6 is absolutely ideal. Another example, from MFL (Foreign Language teaching) which illustrates it better. There is a spoken exam, the idea is that someone will talk with the student in the language in question, to see if they can 'converse' in French, German, Spanish, whatever. It's supposed to (it was years ago) to be completely free flow, you knew the subject might be "My Holiday in France" but not what the examiner would ask. But what actually *happens* in most (if not all) cases now is the questions are known in advance and the students learn the answers verbatim (usually they have these little keyrings on with the Q+A and they practice repeating them). Very effective for passing the test, which simply becomes a memory test. Useless for learning French - it doesn't matter whether the language is French, Spanish, Klingon or just made up, because the student is simply repeating memorised answers without knowing what they mean (often). And no, I'm not being cynical, exaggerating or anything like that ; it really is this bad.

Well ..... I''ve written about 5 lines of PHP in my entire life, and I can answer most of those :( As an ex-teacher, we are reaping what we have sown. I got into computing right at the head of the boom - I owned an SC/MP Introkit, the machine that Sinclair's MK14 was taken from - then a variety of home computers. When I started teaching there were lots of people who had done a bit of programming, or in some cases a lot, on their Spectrums, C64s, whatever, it didn't really matter. I used to teach programming to all levels in Computer Studies 14-16, even the ones who would never make a coder tinkered a bit and got the basic idea. Then came the IBM PC and the dreaded ICT. Powerpoint, WebDesign, more Powerpoint, DTP, WebDesign using a fudged DTP, bits of artwork. Absolute crud. Looked very pretty on Windows with all the jazzy PPT tricks, but we actually learnt more when we were working on BBC Micros (a 6502 based Home Computer, 32k RAM with a tape drive, single floppy or basic network running a structured BASIC for US readers). Since then it has got worse. It started with GNVQ ICT. There was a scam in examinations where passing this was supposedly the same as getting 4 GCSE grade C's. Except it wasn't, a monkey could pass it. So schools piled into it as a way of getting more exam passes to fix the league tables (UK schools have league tables of exam passes). Then we had DiDA, same, then OCR ICT, the same. GCSE passes for basically doing sweet FA. While there are teachers who teach good stuff, most don't even really know what programming is, let alone can write a line of code. So they stick to Powerpoint , DTP, Web Design (with shortcuts like WebPlus) and pretend its for the benefit of the pupils ; it isn't, it's for the benefit of the schools. Computing is almost non-existent now, whether at 14-16 or 16-18. It's considered too hard. Our league tables don't take account of the difficulty of the exam, so pupils are pushed onto noddy rubbish. Near to me, there is a school which claims it is a specialist in Maths and Computing (and it goes up to 18). Only one problem ; it doesn't teach Computing at any level at all. It teaches ICT - a bit. It's a joke. So what do we get at University ; people who can prat about with Powerpoint and the like, can't code a line, don't understand how computers work at all, zero knowledge of the link to electronics, zero technical stuff. This is justified on the grounds that they supposedly have good skills with the multimedia stuff. Reality is they are no good at that either. If you want (say) DTP design, or Web page design, far better to teach a decent designer to use the software than to teach an IT graduate design.