Well you could do the i5 bit for a few hundred. You could split hairs over whether the keyboard was detachable or wireless. ..... pen pick up from any old place. .....

One must ask though, was does a year 7 person do with an i5 CPU?

It's an arts focused school and they do graphic work apparently

Still OTT IMO

Computational Fluid Dynamics probably...


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I would suspect it's more to do with the kickback for the staff than anything...

I wonder if they make the kids spring for Adobe CC at the same time; $15pm on educational discount. Hook'um early.

Very possibly.

I guess a surface is a proper, full operating system - better than an iPad, but still, that sort of computing power is completely surplus to requirements.

At least they can install a decent development environment to learn some basic programming skills.


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Well, from the PoV of actually doing real work, it's pretty much neither one thing nor the other.

Pushing Photoshop, video editing, etc. in something like Adobe CC can actually require lots of horsepower if you are doing it seriously, and lots of RAM. Ask the question and you're typically be pointed towards an i7 with 16GB(at least), a decent graphics card, high resolution large display, etc. - in a desktop/workstation format.

A year 7 kid isn't going to be 'serious', but the same issue holds - if you are going to push the pixels around a weedy surface pro is not going to be a great match for the demands - which makes it fall back on the same old education uses and much lower prices.

Yup, the high school DS and DD will be going to insist on iPads. Annoys me as I have yet to work somewhere that using the iOS. Everywhere I have worked have been Windows based. Kids need to learn the skills they will use in the workplace. Spending 5-6 years doing everything on iOS then potentially going into a workplace with Windows is going to cause problems. Employers will not have the time or resources to be teaching youngsters a new OS.

It;s the one thing that seems to let the school down IMO, as it looks to be a good school in all other respects.

Errr..... have you run anything that requires beef on a Surface? While right now it is limited to 16GB most Adobe CC apps run quite adequately on a Surface Pro 4. Certainly Pshop does and so does Premiere.

Whilst I have still opted for the laptop with 32GB worth of RAM for most products I use, Adobe CC and various 3D modelling applications the RAM is never used unless you are running multiples. Many are still 32 bit anyway. (Well they claim to be 64 bit but most features are still 32). The biggest grunt asset is the Solid State Drive.

Many of my colleagues are running Pro's and those apps no issues.

This year you will have more RAM anyway and the year after you can say good night to the laptop. It will just be Laplet and the phablet and you can wave goodnight to this tablet gimmicky thing.

I did say serious usage - HD or 4K video, uncompressed (coz that's effectively what you need for editing) hurts without lots of RAM, and fast HD etc. Also offloading the processing to a decent GPU is also key.

And the surface pro 4 is effectively a laptop anyway - they pretty much gave up on the tablet side of things. Just need them to cut the price to a reasonable level and stop trying to charge for the keyboard as an 'optional extra'

Yeah Pixlar factory will use desktops for a long time to come. Need the room for the water coolants.

But for most, even the basic Photoshoppers and Premiers the new style Laptop (call it a tablet or laplet) will be the norm and the tablet its self will be sqeezed between the new style laptops (Surface style) and your 5.5" phones.

Took my daughter in to buy her Macbook Air before school started and got a couple of hundred off for student discount at JB Hifi.

Plenty of life left in the PC, laptop etc and they will be better and still be being made in 5-10 years time. There will be a need for devices in most categories in the near future. Business will still want desktops and laptops. Tablets, laplets, phaplets etc will be available to the leisure market

Technology moves fast but the tech in its wake moves slowly:
The PC as we know it in its current form has been with us for at least 25 years
People still buy CDs/DVDs - just have a look in JB
etc

Very, very few people predict the future accurately

Actually, I'm thinking not.

I have this sneaking suspicion that we are on the verge of another jump - this time to augmented reality (or as someone is trying to rename it, mixed reality). Even if Magic Leap don't deliver, someone will.

Look at your list of devices and the only real practical difference is size of the screen. Break that contradiction and things change dramatically, you aren't in Kansas any more and you aren't looking 'down' and 'in' but 'up' and 'out'.

Yeah that's the next leap. I do agree AR will be the norm ....... some day.

But kids at school still need to learn the basics - and I don't think that an iPad is a suitable platform for that - I do agree that the Raspberry Pi represents a particularly cost effective method for kids to get on board with programming though.


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