Dear Apple, Happy New Year!

As a long time follower, cheerleader, educational buyer and user of your products (I even championed you during the down times, the years of the All-in-One G3 “Molar” Macintosh in which I convinced people in my district was still a better purchase than the PCs they were also considering at the time) so I believe that I have the background and the “skin in the game” to write this letter.

Maybe it is me, but it seems that you are moving a bit farther away from your education roots. I remember the days when you were all over the education space. Conferences, door prizes, posters. Hell, there are still schools that have your “Think Different” posters up and that happened twenty years ago! Yes, I understand that products and companies must evolve in order to remain relevant, and you certainly have with your consumer products. Who doesn’t think that the iPhone is the best smartphone out there?

Remember when Steve Jobs said “Education was in your DNA?” Tim Cook said it too. So have a host of other big shot executives over the years. But DNA evolves as well. The funny thing about DNA is, that there are parts of DNA that are, for all intents and purposes, useless. Genetic code that have long ago lost it’s usefulness. Scientists call it “junk DNA.” It is still there, it still functions at some basic level, but it maybe is not as important to the overall well being of the organism that is once was. Kind of like the tails we all used to have…we still have code for that, but most of us don’t have tails anymore. So one can SAY that education is in your DNA. But is that DNA code still useful, still replicating? Still part of your overall genetic code?

I hope so. I hope that the part of the DNA that you refer to when you talk about education is more like the DNA for your arms, or legs, or eyes, and not the DNA code for the appendix or tail.

You have done some amazing things over the years in education. From the ACOT programs to the marketing of your products for creative types, to iTunes U and iBooks, there are some pretty cool tools out there that a select group enlightened educators use. Your sales people are second to none in the education space, IF you are a large school district. But not everyone “gets it.” Not everyone sees the value of your products, only the price tag. The move of the classroom computer towards a tool, (which you helped create by the way), and the projection towards 1:1 environments, has given us cheap, almost throwaway devices like Chromebooks. Cheap is good, low bid is the go bid, in the eyes of cash strapped public schools, who are getting less funding, not more funding for technology from more and more conservative state and federal legislatures.

Money is king, queen and princes of education, sadly, where the best tool for students is not always the correct tool. More often than not, the cheapest tool wins out. And with each Chromebook, cheap PC laptop and android table purchased for students, your DNA in education becomes less “Arms and Legs” and more “Tails.”

So how can you move that less important educational DNA back to a place of prominence in the eyes of education, especially those districts that want to purchase Apple but can’t afford Apple? I have been thinking about this for some time, and since the new year is a time of refresh, and starting over, here are some things that I think you can do to that will keep your educational DNA vibrant for several years to come:

1. It is time to move iTunes U to a multi-platform setting just as you did with iTunes. The material in iTunes U is simply awesome, and the iTunes U aggregator is second to none. But you have to have an iPad to really use it. That means only iOS. Windows, heck, even MAC, would be a nice place to start with iTunes U, and if you want to really piss off those Chromebook makers, make an Chrome version of iTunes U.

2. It is time to create PODCASTS-U and to multiple OS’s as well. There is a lot of educational material in your podcast aggregator, and frankly, it is hard to tell kids to find that material when there are lots of explicit podcasts mixed in. Why not make a K12 friendly version of your Podcast app?

3. Provide free Apple Certification for educational technicians. Today, so many techs do “Apple work” not because they don’t want to, but because they don’t know how to. They got lots of free Microsoft training, can find lots of free MS training online, and they go with what they know. In many districts, the IT department makes the decisions for the academic technology , and they go with what they know. They know Microsoft because they have never been trained on Mac OS, iOS, and the associated hardware. Make Apple certification free for any .edu employee anywhere

4. Move iBooks and all the associated free materials into other OS’s. Again, want too piss off Google? Make iBooks open in their environment. Not the iBooks author, just the iBooks bookstore.

5. Create an iBooks-U app that is dedicated to K12. All of the books in iBooks-U would be vetted and appropriate for students.

6. Create iPad education bundles. I have suggested this before. Don’t sell iPads all by themselves to education customers. It pisses us off that we then have to go get a keyboard, or some other peripheral. Why not bundle them all together and sell as a single unit? I get the 10 pack of iPad and keyboard. Of better yet, why not make an iPad just for education that has a keyboard as part of it? You would not believe how many teachers think that there must be an associated keyboard with an iPad because everything has to be typed. Either convince education that that is not the case, or start bundling physical keyboards with your iPads.

7. Create iPad Software bundles that come preloaded with apps appropriate for the buyers. If the iPads are going to a K-2 environment, then the iPads come bundled with appropriate apps for that grade level. You used to do this with Macs back in the day. You could order Macs with a set of accompanying CDs in science, or ELA, or research. Think about how cool it would be to have the “Science iPad Bundle?”

8. Advertise the crap out of the education specific stuff you already have in place. 99% of the teachers in the US have no idea of the content that is available for them in iBooks, or on iTunes U. That is because you have an attitude of “Build it and they will come.” That worked when it was just you and Microsoft. But now there are so many players in the filed, it isn’t just good enough to create. It doesn’t work that way anymore in education. Educators have to be shown what is available. They don’t know what they don’t know. What teacher in their right mind would know about the incredible “One Best Thing” collection of iBooks unless they were told? Or the content in iTunes U? Why make something if you don’t tell anyone it exists? Transformative tech works only if someone uses it. It doesn’t get used if no one knows it exists.

9. Bring back the Apple Classroom of Tomorrow project and start figuring out what schools are going to look like 20 years from now. You did a great job with ACOT I and II. In fact, your predictions of the classroom of the 2000’s was spot on in the late 1980’s. That project guided your educational ship for several years.

10. Finally, you simply have to lower your prices for education. You are getting beat up by incredibly cheap laptops. It is a hard sell to try to convince a school board not familiar with your product that your low end $999 laptop is better than HPs’ low end $199 laptop, when all they see are dollar signs. What is your non-snarky answer to the sentence: “I can buy 5 Chromebooks for the cost of one Mac Laptop?”

Happy New Year. Sincerely Tim