In a bit of fortuitous timing, I was already planning to be in New York next week.
Haven’t heard much about the event beyond “textbooks”, as was previously reported.
Naturally, Apple chooses to announce the event right in the middle of CES. By the end of the afternoon I expect 75% of the companies at that event to be talking about their upcoming textbook offerings.
After having looked through some rumour sites and the general buzz about this years first Apple event, I started to wonder what exactly the companies plans were for their “education announcement in the Big Apple”. I think it’s fair to say, it will be an announcement an educational product, service, or revolution, etc.
Clayton Morris said that “this will not be a hardware-related announcement” and although I agree to an extent (i.e. there will be no “major” hardware announcement - no highly rumoured AppleTV or iPad3 just yet), I do think that Tim Cook will be talking about hardware at some point. Hardware plays a huge part in education, and Apple currently offer compelling discounts to those in education. iPads however are not currently discounted to students and educators, and with a huge shift in the way iPads are being used in the educational system, I think we will see something here. I expect textbooks to come to the iBook store, as well as updated content in iTunes U, their educational content distribution system. iPads may see an educational price tier, joining the Mac family of computers and notebooks, all of which have cheaper 10+% discounts to educational customers.
iWork has seen some major changes in the 2010 and with the updates to iCloud, we’ve seen cloud computing and syncing documents between devices starting to take off. Apple currently does not offer any compelling solutions for collaborative projects, as iCloud will only sync between a single user’s Mac and iOS devices. Updating these services and apps could pull in further iWork customers, pulling them away from Office and Google Docs.
Much of the speculation revolves around content publishing, and with the event being hosted at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, it is almost certain that the company will be talking about its entry into the textbook business.
As per usual, I assume the event will start off with figures of 2010, stating their success with the iPhone 4S, how well the iPad has sold compared to other tablets and how their retail stores are still successful.
Quite frankly, no one really knows what will be announced this time round and that really, really excites me! The even will take place January 19th, just another week away from today.
