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Microsoft Education Windows Hardware

Microsoft Unveils Windows 10 S Laptops Starting at $189 and New Office 365 Tools for Students (venturebeat.com) 107

Posted by msmash from the new-offerings dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft today unveiled new Windows 10 S devices from Lenovo and JP, starting at $189, aimed at the education market. The company also announced new Office 365 learning tools for students. The news mirrors Microsoft's firstline workers push in September, which saw new Windows 10 S devices starting at $275. The company is now simply doing the same as part of its latest EDU push, and it's not mincing words when it comes to explaining its target audience: "schools who don't want to compromise on Chromebooks."

Microsoft unveiled four new Windows 10 devices that are all supposed to offer more than Chrome OS. Two are standard laptops: the Lenovo 100e powered by Intel Celeron Apollo Lake for $189 and JP's Classmate Leap T303 with Windows Hello for $199. The other two are 2-in-1s: the Lenovo 300e convertible with pen support for $279 and the Trigono V401 with pen and touch for $299. All four are spill resistant, ruggedized for students, and promise long battery life to avoid having wires all over the classroom.
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Microsoft Unveils Windows 10 S Laptops Starting at $189 and New Office 365 Tools for Students More

Microsoft Unveils Windows 10 S Laptops Starting at $189 and New Office 365 Tools for Students

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  • Start early (Score:3)

    by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Monday January 22, 2018 @01:24PM (#55978853)
    Gotta start that tracking and data collection as early as possible.

    • Re:Start early (Score:5, Funny)

      by avandesande ( 143899 ) on Monday January 22, 2018 @01:34PM (#55978959) Journal
      Yes evil microsoft... all my kids school stuff is done on Google Docs. So much better!

    • Even more the hooking them! (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It's actually one of their oldest tricks.

      Whenever Microsoft got sentenced for one of their extensive number of crimes comitted, they would convince the judge, to "pay" by giving "free licenses" to schools.

      Which were not only manufactured with the hard work of true hand-made Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V ... I'm kidding, they had a fresh set of them right off the little script they use to genetrate them, and wete literally completely worthless ... , but more imortantly, got the kids used to considering Windows the norma

    • Gotta start that tracking and data collection as early as possible.

      I know the Microsoft haterade is abundant in these parts, but at this point, MS is playing catch-up. Apple had a hold in the educational markets in the late 80s and early 90's, then MS ate their lunch with virtually free licensing for schools with commodity hardware. Now, Google is all educationally trendy since they give away G-Suite Apps for Business or whatever the hell they call it, and a palette of Chromebooks are a whole lot cheaper than a palette of Optiplex workstations with the added bonus of being

      • ...MS is playing catch-up....

        Then why not distinguish itself by not doing all the tracking and data collection?

        • ...MS is playing catch-up....

          Then why not distinguish itself by not doing all the tracking and data collection?

          You mean like Apple has done?

      • Re:Start early (Score:4, Insightful)

        by sensei moreh ( 868829 ) on Monday January 22, 2018 @02:03PM (#55979219)

        ... why are we teaching products rather than principles?

        Some things never change. Back in the day, the appropriate follow-on was, "They should be learning Word Processing, not WordStar or WordPerfect.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Miser ( 36591 )

          Exactly!

          I have more often than not used a line from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

          "You have to learn WHY things work on a starship."

          And I would usually ad ... "And NOT just what buttons to push."

          Concepts. Teach concepts and it doesn't matter what word processor you're using. WordPerfect, Word, WordStar, LibreOffice, etc.

          -Miser

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gfxguy ( 98788 )

        It would be OK if they just stuck with basics, but you need to choose a spreadsheet program to use, even if you don't want to teach to that specific product; you need to choose a word processing program. Once you know the basics, that knowledge should transfer to just about any other spreadsheet or word processor, but you still have to choose one to use.

        The bigger problem is when my kids homework MUST be sent to the teacher in Word format, or Excel format. I'm not sure what a good solution to that is, but

        • I'm not sure what a good solution to that is....

          LibreOffice. I've used OpenOffice (and now LibreOffice) at work for 13 years in an environment that mandates Microsoft Office file formats. This has been a solved problem for a long time now.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by gfxguy ( 98788 )
            I want to agree, but I don't think so - my kids get documents from the teacher that don't render correctly, and they've made documents that don't render correctly in Word. Perhaps they didn't do formatting the way they should, perhaps the teacher didn't, either - I don't know, but I do know they've had problems.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by higuita ( 129722 )

          teach in several of then, then do the "exams" in one that they didn't used in the class...
          that is the best way to tell if someone learned to think instead of just memorizing buttons locations. yes, interfaces changes, the the concepts are always there, just learn how to search for the feature you need

          It is exactly the same as problem solving, you should solve new problems in the exam, not exactly the same problems you have done in class

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Gr8Apes ( 679165 )

          The bigger problem is when my kids homework MUST be sent to the teacher in Word format, or Excel format. I'm not sure what a good solution to that is

          PDF because it's not system dependent and will actually print correctly. (ODF just doesn't have enough support, but when/if it does, great)

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by gfxguy ( 98788 )
            How is the teacher supposed to use a PDF to see if my daughter entered a formula in Excel correctly?

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by Gr8Apes ( 679165 )
              Because if it's incorrect, so is the answer. If the teacher cannot determine that, then the homework is not properly designed and implemented.

      • why are we teaching products rather than principles?

        Actually we teach both. The problem is twofold: To learn the principles by example you often need to use a product. To be efficient in the real world it helps if you already use the product that everyone else is already using.

        I had to learn how to lay out a page and type a letter somehow. I may as well do it with a resume filler rather than the eyebrow raising "Proficient in LaTeX" that is likely to land you precisely zero jobs.

  • Ok..lenovo I know.

    But what/who the fuck is JP?

    Seems the author of that article assumed the audience would know who/what JP was? Guessing it is a computer company, but geez....at least leave a link to find out who this unknown company is.

    Are they new? Where are they based?

    I've never heard of them before...

    • But what/who the fuck is JP?

      Justice of the Peace.

      More seriously... it’s a sign that Microsoft is having to reach pretty far afield nowadays to get anyone to buy into their plans.

    • Portuguese [bloomberg.com] company founded in 1989

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by orlanz ( 882574 )

      I think it is a typo. It is HP. Even the original Microsoft post says JP but then goes on to reference HP laptops as other regular offerings.

  • They're offsetting cost with advertising and demographics research revenue. Then they're outsourcing the data mining to the cheapest, least ethical, foreign 3rd party company. Good luck protecting your childrens' privacy with one of these...

  • >Apollo Lake

    They are dumping intel stuff before they switch to AMD and Qualcomm

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fubarrr ( 884157 )

      It might be a surprise to some, but Apollo lake and ULP cores are priced nearly similarly in China to wholesale buyers around 120 to 170 usd for whole chipset

      • There's no way the processor/chipsets are $120-$170 USD - especially considering the systems they are going into have SRPs of around $190USD.

        I suspect that, for these systems, processor/chipset costs are on the order of $10-$15USD.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by fubarrr ( 884157 )

          I checked it, and yes. I was 100 bucks off: $56 for N3350, but oddly n4200 costs whopping 80 bucks more

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fubarrr ( 884157 )

      Another thing: dual core apollo lake soc are usually beat quad core models in benchmarks despite having double the cores and more cache. N4200 are less performant than low end models...

  • Is that a Chinese knockoff of HP? WTH?
  • If these are sold to consumers (It says education market but will they be sold retail?) they will be a big hit and an utter disaster as soon as the proud new owners start trying to install regular Windows software. And while Microsoft says you can upgrade S to Home I suspect they make it as hard as possible to do so. I can already pick up a 11.6" Insignia tablet with Windows 10 Home for $199 [bestbuy.com] It's only got an Atom X5 processor but I doubt there is a significant performance delta from their power throttled Ce

    • I have a couple of Acer Win10 systems with a similar amount of DDR/SSD as these systems and they don't take well to any apps other than Office and performance, in terms of waiting for a window to come up, is abysmal (it's actually a lot worse with Office360).

      The systems have 4GB DDR and 32GB SSD - with Office the SSD is filled to around 19GB

      Maybe Win10s running on Apollo Lake has better performance but I would view any systems with a jaundiced eye until I had a chance to test them out.

      • Interesting. I've had a Winbook TW100 [microcenter.com] with just 2GB RAM and an Intel Baytrail-T Z3735D for several years and it has been a decent (not great) performer. The only real pain point was the Realtek WiFi/Bluetooth chip (RTL8723BS) which has a problem doing both simultaneously. I've not tried the Acer units.

    • If these are sold to consumers (It says education market but will they be sold retail?) they will be a big hit and an utter disaster as soon as the proud new owners start trying to install regular Windows software.

      Even in the education market, I don't necessarily see them taking off until Microsoft makes Visual Studio available through Windows Store. K-8 maybe, but in high school (grades 9-12), teachers and administrators expect student devices to support the course materials for "introduction to computer science" type classes.

  • These machines have Apollo Lake Celeron processors

    https://ark.intel.com/products... [intel.com]

    They're Goldmont cores - the descendent of Atom - though they've dropped the Atom branding. Still they're very much descendants of the chips that powered the original netbooks.

    https://www.anandtech.com/show... [anandtech.com]

    The Lenovo machine has a 11.6" 1366 x 768 display rather than the netbook standard of 10.1" 1024*600, but that's probably the minimum viable display.

    Apparently it's got a N3450, which Anandtech points out is a 4 core, 4

  • Double edged sword (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Monday January 22, 2018 @02:34PM (#55979521) Journal
    It looks like a good plan on paper. Give away the tools dirt cheap to students, when they graduate and take up jobs they would demand professional versions of the tools at work place, market share, brand ambassadors, etc etc, yada yada yada. That is why Ansys would give away its flagship crown jewel product for dirt cheap prices to the universities, with some throttling no doubt. The idea is, these kids will some day be managers who were familiar with Ansys.

    But in the case of Microsoft, in this particular project, it has great potential to backfire. Kids are used to powerful machines, gaming machines, either they own it or they have friends who do. Even the public library machines are usually more powerful. They might see the 189$ cheap machine to be too slow and blame Microsoft instead of the low horsepower hardware.

    And Lenovo, HP etc load the PC with deadly levels of crap ware and nagware. And Microsoft adds its own bunch to the mix, and it does not test them at low end hardware. I know it personally. I bought a desktop as my "bill paying computer". Exclusively to log in to banks, brokerages and credit cards. Never use any other machine to log into sensitive account and never use that machine for anything else. So, naturally, I picked a low end AMD desktop. Oh. my. god. Is it slow! or what!! Something called superfetch would keep thrashing the disk. Or onedrive service. Or some disk indexer. Or some telemetry. Hunted and killed every one of these processes, and it is still slow. 12 GB, four processor machine takes forever to open Quicken.

    One taste like this, and the kids will actively hate microsoft and will go out of their way to avoid microsoft products when they become managers.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      blame Microsoft instead of the low horsepower hardware.

      Well, I don't think it would pan out *that* way, as their more powerful gaming machines almost certainly also run Microsoft software.

      However, chromebooks do have a reputation for being crappy, and no small part of it is the hardware. Microsoft proving their stuff can also run crappy will erase any vague belief that ChromeOS is the cause of the crappiness.

      Of course, ChromeOS as software isn't very good, limiting and some definite software issues.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kenh ( 9056 )

      12 GB, four processor machine takes forever to open Quicken

      No, it doesn't. What POS low-end AMD did you buy that has 12 Gigs of RAM?

      Why would anyone would intentionally buy the literally cheapest desktop they could find and complain about performance.

      How much longer would it take to open Quicken if that same machine ran Linux? (Infinitely longer, since Quicken doesn't run on Linux)

      How much faster would Quicken run on a $200 Mac running OS X? (Trick question, cheapest Mac is nearly 5x what your AMD budget desktop cost)

      Guess what, performance sucks when you buy absol

      • Not 12 GB. I misedited it. 12GB is the other desktop. This one is 4 or 8 GB
      • The performance sucks, and I don't mind, I got it knowingly. It is a rarely used machine for a specific purpose. I mentioned it to show how bad the performance is on low end machines.

        They don't test user experience on low end machines. Things that improve response in a more powerful machine degrades in low end machines very very badly. They don't turn off these memory and disk hogs on low end machines. I can hunt them and kill them and make the machine usable. But most people cant.

    • Well, actually I suspect something more "evil". This is a big money loser, to the point of not even being effective long term. As for why Microsoft is really doing this, well, we probably won't figure that out without a bit of help. But I can pretty much guarantee you there is nothing altruistic about this. It can't be about helping students or helping the poor, it's about "something" though, just not sure.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by e r ( 2847683 )

      Give away the tools dirt cheap to students, when they graduate and take up jobs they would demand professional versions of the tools at work place, market share, brand ambassadors, etc etc, yada yada yada.

      So a good filter to exclude idiots is to ask them what OS they use and why? I actually think there's something to that.

      One taste like this, and the kids will actively hate microsoft and will go out of their way to avoid microsoft products when they become managers.

      I hope so. But I don't have faith.

    • So, naturally, I picked a low end AMD desktop. Oh. my. god. Is it slow! or what!! Something called superfetch would keep thrashing the disk.

      My desktop is a Skylake i7 running Windows 10. Since I only use it for transcoding video (Blu-Rays to H.265), I didn't bother wasting money on a SSD. Even trying to browse the web on it results in disk thrashing which grinds the machine to a halt. Windows is just no longer tolerable for general use without an SSD.

    • This is off topic to your main topic. But about that low speed "bill paying computer"...

      Get a linux usb.
      Boot the desktop with it.

      There, a nice fast pc, quick to get and fast to boot. With firefox pre-installed, you can do all your banking stuff there. Also upon shutting down, it keeps nothing since the OS was loaded in the RAM. It's a good alternative if you don't have the time to fix Windows.

    • They might see the 189$ cheap machine to be too slow and blame Microsoft instead of the low horsepower hardware.

      So they won't see the connection between something really cheap and something really slow?

      If they're learning something at school, it apparently isn't math and critical thinking.

  • since when is 83% "great work"?

  • You mean, doing exactly same thing as Chromebooks? (Score:3)

    by iamacat ( 583406 ) on Monday January 22, 2018 @02:47PM (#55979667)

    Chromebooks have Play Store (and sideloading APKs/Linux with some hackery irrelevant to an average user). These laptops have Microsoft Store, not sure about developer sideloads. Seems up to which app/game selection you prefer?

    • last time i checked chromebooks were basically tablets with a keyboard. it appears windows 10s at least lets you run real software, albeit no sideloading, at least by default.but you could convert to the full OS if you wanted, i don't know if this is possible right now

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by xeoron ( 639412 )
      MS also has malware and viruses to worry about. Chromebooks might have a rogue extension here or there, but much easier to fix.

    • Chromebooks have Play Store (and sideloading APKs/Linux with some hackery irrelevant to an average user). These laptops have Microsoft Store, not sure about developer sideloads. Seems up to which app/game selection you prefer?

      No. Not the same thing. The Play Store for one is useful.

  • Yikes (Score:2)

    by jon3k ( 691256 )
    If one of their launch partners was JP (who I've personally never even heard of) I don't expect this to go well.

  • Do they run linux? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If yes, I'm interested.

  • Microsoft is not going to let Google take over schools without a fight.

    Well that explains everything.

    It doesn't matter how shit the hardware is or how crappy the students' experiences will be, Microsoft is like a drug overlord that wants to get their hooks into the young people as soon as possible to guarantee a revenue stream for life.

  • As you cant RUN anything on them anymore.
    So.. windows, where you can not run windows programs.

  • The example physics test... seriously? (Score:3)

    by scatbomb ( 1099255 ) on Monday January 22, 2018 @10:26PM (#55982833)
    Did anyone see the example test questions in the office 365 demo screenshot? Are physics tests really like that now? If this is representative of how low academic standards are... we're screwed. Every single answer (except the 1st I guess) is completely wrong yet 5/6? Are you joking?

    • Every single answer (except the 1st I guess) is completely wrong yet 5/6? Are you joking?

      What do you expect when you get the marketing department to check your physics exam.

  • OK, don't tease me, just tell me. S as in "Sucks" ?

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