Dear university students: While it’s tempting to buy the hot new MacBook Air, doing so would mean a huge loss of flexibility. You simply don’t need to pay hundreds of dollars more for a laptop that’s less versatile. An iPad Pro with a Magic Keyboard and Pencil fits your needs much better, especially now that it has the very same M2 chip inside.
And beyond the versatility, the whole iPad lineup can do just about everything you can expect a Mac to do every day.
To be clear, there are exceptions to this — some students really do need a Mac. But odds are you’re not one of them.
Many students rely on Apple devices — including some who get them for free — though iOS and macOS don’t offer functions designed especially for school-related routines. But the Schooly app just came out on the App Store, giving students one special place to organize their scholastic lives.
A majority of today’s college students are Mac fans. A new study found that 71 percent those in higher education either use or would like to use macOS computers. But there’s an important caveat: many of these students actually use other types because they can’t afford Apple’s offerings.
Apple unveiled its cheapest 9.7-inch iPad ever today, only there’s a catch: it’s only the cheapest iPad ever if you meet certain qualifications
Most normal customer won’t qualify for the special $309 price tag and will have to shell out $329 for the Apple Pencil-supported iPad. However, there are still ways to qualify even if you’re not a student.
Apple’s first big event of 2018 is practically here! Unlike most Apple keynotes, today’s “field trip” education-oriented event in Chicago won’t be streamed live.
Don’t worry. Cult of Mac will be in attendance and we’ll be live blogging everything with up-to-the-minute info on all the new goodies. Not only is Apple expected to preview some new educational software, but we could also see a new iPad, improved Apple Pencil and maybe even a new MacBook Air.
The keynote starts Tuesday, March 27, at 10 a.m. Central time. So save this page and get ready for Apple’s most mysterious event in years.
Apple will take a field trip out of Silicon Valley to host its first major event of 2018 tomorrow. Instead of focusing on iPhones and Apple Watches, this Apple keynote will be all about education and creativity.
Rumors have been swirling for months that new MacBook Airs and an updated, inexpensive iPad could arrive this spring. We might see those, but Apple probably has a couple other surprises in store that you haven’t heard of.
Apple will not provide a livestream of the event, but Cult of Mac will be in attendance. Joins us Tuesday morning for our liveblog of everything that’s going down at the event. In the meantime, here’s our handy guide to what to expect.
Apple CEO Tim Cook warned MIT’s graduating class of the dangers society faces as a result of rapidly advancing technology during his commencement speech this morning.
Cook challenged the 2017 graduates to measure their impact on humanity on the lives they touch, rather than the likes you get on social media.
The new MacBook Pro is the most gorgeous laptop Apple’s ever made. It’s thin, powerful and touchable. There’s just one big problem: It’s expensive as f***!
Dropping two grand on a new MacBook isn’t an easy decision for many Apple fans. But if you’re lusting after the new MacBook Pro and don’t have quite enough cash to foot the bill, there are a few ways you can get a lower price.
The app that has become famous around college campuses is now ready to show itself in a different form: as a desktop website. The creators have been testing a web version of Yik Yak in private beta for a while now, but as of today the site is open for public use.
Going to college is supposed to be all about going to parties, drinking heavily, hooking up and maybe squeezing in a few classes if you find the time. But when it comes to college students today, it turns out what they really want most is an iPhone.
Researchers at Student Monitor asked 1,200 U.S. undergraduates last fall to choose “what’s in” among students from a list of 77 options. Not only did students rank the iPhone as more popular than coffee, texting, drinking beer and college football, but Apple’s smartphone somehow managed to top the collegiate tradition of “hooking up” to take the No. 1 spot.
The iPad didn’t do too bad in the survey either, topping Instagram, laptops and selfies. Here’s the rundown on what college students ranked as most important:
I stood in the doorway, still teary-eyed from goodbyes with my parents. There, before me, sat the first lesson of my freshman year in college.
Peter Otto had a blond mohawk and twirled a shiny butterfly knife. He had already adorned his side of the room with posters of his favorite bands: The Meatmen, Dead Kennedys and Siouxsie and the Banshees.
“I guess I’m your roommate,” I said and he pointed to the lower bunk. I was chubby, an Eagle Scout and a mama’s boy. But I had one cool card I could play — a boombox that played compact discs, a relatively new music format.
But with only two CDs — a synth-pop album by Kenny Loggins and the debut record from Bruce Hornsby & the Range — there would be no cool, not then anyway. Otto wound up being the best roommate I ever had during two college tours. Some of his music made it into my CD collection, which accelerated in the fall of 1985, but I doubt he ever took to Loggins.
Nearly 30 years later, I keep reading stories that eulogize the CD, report plummeting album sales and lay out how the music industry is now taking its product directly to customers through social media, streaming services or direct downloads from a group’s website.
Transitioning to the college lifestyle can be awkward at first. Being away from home, having a heavy workload and still wanting to hangout with friends can be a lot to manage all at once.
Luckily, your Mac can help relieve a little of that stress throughout the school year. In today’s video, take a look at these five hot Mac tips that can make your new year of college easier: be prepared for thieves, find the best way to take notes and more.
You’re going to college, which means plenty of sleepless nights, lots of good memories, and maybe a little studying on the side. The truth is that college can be stressful, so it never hurts to be too prepared.
Luckily, there are tons of excellent apps out there on both the Mac and iOS to help you survive. Here are 10 of the best:
Apple has today kicked off its annual Back to School promotion through the Apple online store. As it did in 2012, the Cupertino company is offering a $100 App Store gift card with every new Mac, or a $50 card with a new iPad.
This year’s promotion also includes the iPhone, which now comes with a $50 gift card, too.
How many college-aged girls do you know running around with broken iPhone screens? 15? 20? All of them? It takes the average college girl like 2.37 days to shatter her new iPhone screen, or at least that’s the stereotype some choose to believe.
To make things easier for college girls, Apple is launching the iPhone 5C. It comes with a pre-shattered screen so all your friends think you live a wild and crazy life. It’s genius. It’s like buying pre-faded jeans. It’s also totally fake, but The Onion is on to something in their latest hilarious but fake news story that covered the launch of the fictitious device.
Imagine jotting down a quick memo, tossing it into the air and having a little magical fairy swoop by and catch it, stashing it away safely for later reference. TopXNotes is the next best thing! We all know and love our Mac Stickies but imagine them on steroids. That is what you get with TopXNotes, the most comprehensive task manager yet. Let’s face it, Stickies aren’t fail proof and those quickly jotted notes can sometimes be crucial. TopXNotes constantly autosaves your notes and categorizes them to help insure anything worthy of being written down doesn’t accidentally fall through the cracks.
You’re going to college. That means huge lists of all the crap you need to start school of right. Not just books, furniture, clothing, mini-beer refrigerators, and all that junk, but also backpacks and probably some tech gear to get you through the semester.
For most people, the MacBook Air is the best laptop on the market. But if you’re going to college, you might not even need a laptop anymore. We think a lot of college students can get by and just buy an iPad instead of a MacBook Air. Here’s why.
The first week of college is filled with a bunch of crazy new things you have to adapt to if you want to make it out alive. Co-ed dorms. People with bad facial hair. Faux-Intellectuals. Scantly clad women. Demented professors. Weird cultish groups called fraternities. The absence of personal hygiene. And most importantly, the astronomical prices of textbooks.
Why have we had a congressional hearing on steroid use in baseball, but not a peep about college textbook prices? We thought that the iPad and eBooks were supposed to make education a whole lot cheaper, but most college students still buy physical textbooks. Here at Cult of Mac, for back to school season, we wanted to find out what’s cheaper: buying an iPad and only buying eTextbooks or going the traditional route and buying forty or fifty pounds worth of dead paper every semester.
Which is better for the penny-pinching student? The results are pretty surprising.
When it comes to talking about iOS devices in healthcare, most of think of doctors carrying iPads the way that they used to carry lengthy paper charts or clipboards. We think about doctors looking at X-rays and other diagnostic tests on an iPad, perhaps even using the iPad to illustrate a broken bone, illness, or surgical procedure.
Doctors, however, aren’t the only healthcare professionals to be embracing mobile technology. A new study shows that the vast majority of nurses have also embraced mobile devices, particularly the iPhone and other smartphones. It also highlights that differing needs of healthcare professionals when it comes to mobile technology.
Barnes & Noble’s announcement that it was spinning off its Nook business and that Microsoft would be a significant stakeholder in the new company raised a lot of eyebrows. The partnership seemed unnecessary in order to meet the goals of settling a patent dispute and ensuring a Nook app for Windows 8 tablets.
It turns out that Barnes & Nobel will be shifting its textbook business to the new company along with the Nook and that Microsoft’s $300 million investment will likely be centered around creating an e-textbook initiative that will likely compete head-on with Apple’s fledging iPad-based e-textbook business.
Apple’s e-textbook initiative, which the company launched in January along with iBooks Author and a revamped iTunes U service is aimed at K-12 schools rather than higher education. Higher education has a different set of needs when it comes to textbooks, study, and reference materials. There are also big differences in device/platform selection between K-12 and the college market.
In fact, these differences are probably a big part of why Apple decided to focus the majority of its e-textbook (and, by extension its iPad in education) effort on the K-12 market. It’s a market that yields Apple more growth opportunities now and down the road.
Crappy internships have become a sort of initiation process that American students subject themselves to in order to enter the workplace. Working for free for 4 months – making copies, fetching coffee, and filing paperwork – sounds like hell for a lot of American students, who love to complain about the hardships of their internships.
Well, turns out American interns have a pretty beautiful life compared to their Chinese counterparts at Foxconn who are forced into internships that resemble slave labor and are told they will not graduate unless they spend months working on the production lines.
Apple’s announcement of Mountain Lion breaks with the past in a few ways including by announcing with out a major Apple event. One of the other changes is the news the Apple is moving OS X to a yearly release cycle like iOS. That may be a great way to introduce new features for consumers, but it’s likely to create problems for organizations that have a large number of Macs.
Schools and colleges are still among the organizations that have large Mac populations and have always been a key market for Apple. A yearly release schedule stands to impact them more than any other type of organization and that impact isn’t likely to be a positive one.
At the University of Iowa, school administrators want students and visitors to quickly and easily learn what’s happening, get around and find campus resources. Their new iPhone app is a notable step towards that goal, including addressing that most pressing of all questions: is my laundry done yet?