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Sunday, January 31, 2010

Apple Announces the iPad Apple Tablet with Textbooks, Web and More!

By: Christian Simmon & Geoffrey Blass


http://www.apple.com/ipad/

The knew Apple iPad represents an opportunity to revolutionize the education industry. The availability for interactive textbooks has always been dream of mine, and apple's iPad makes it possible.


How much do students spend on course materials each year?



While this information varies based on factors such as course load and subject matter, students
estimated spending an average of $702 on required course materials during the 2006-07
academic year according to NACS’ Student Watch™ 2008 report. Required course materials can
be any type of book or media required or recommended by faculty for classes. These could be
new or used textbooks, regular or general books, even children’s books, as well as
coursepacks/readers/customized materials or digital/electronic educational materials.

Apple iPad costs: Apple has announced the cost on Wednesday that it ranges in between $499 and $830, which is lower than the expected cost. Analysts, expected that it would have cost $800 to $ 1000. So, the brokerage analysts were pleasantly surprised by the announcement. However, the costs depend on the models and their respective memory. Apple iPad with Wi-Fi alone costs $ 499 that comes with 16 GB model and 32GB model costs $ 599 and 64 GB model costs 699 dollars and so on. 3G will cost you $130 more...


16GB 32GB 64GB
Wi-Fi $499 $599 $699
Wi-Fi + 3G $629 $729 $829
  • Prices in U.S. dollars. International pricing will be announced at a later date.
  • 3G data plan sold separately.
This product is perfect for the academic world. Everyone remembers, the old process of buying books for college. You go to the bookstore, you search, then its sold out or worse used and already all marked up.

As soon as people realize they can buy one iPad and download all the textbooks they will ever need, education as we remember will change. By using the iPad, students will be able to learn interactively. Think, animated graphs, videos, everything that is currently being done by computers now, without the need to be on campus, tethered to a library computer, or the pain of lugging around an overweight laptop. The Text book industry is in trouble.

There has been some negative creatique of the Apple iPad, experts are saying it is missing a few key features: multitasking; adobe flash support; no camera; etc. My take is that technology is involving and no one device is going to be able to do everything perfectly. The iPad, is moving in the correct direction. Everyone knows Apple makes huge improvements come software updates, remeber people iPhone v1 to v2, we now are on v3.1 big changes there.

I foresee all schools and Universities using these tablets as an alternative to expensive, overweight, one dimensional, old fashion textbooks.