On Apple, Love Letters, and Educators

I made a some predictions about what I was hoping for at the 2018 Apple Education event that took place in Chicago. Although I didn’t do that great on my predictions (I got 3 out of 6), one thing that I was hoping for came true: Apple finally raised the iCloud storage for Managed Apple ID users from 5Gb to 200GB. This will make a huge difference for anyone that has already deployed Managed Apple ID at their school.

Unsurprisingly, this caught John Gruber’s attention during this week’s The Talk Show podcast with guest Serenity Caldwell. Gruber pondered why the education market got this particular upgrade before regular Apple ID users. I could sense a little bit of spite in Gruber’s voice during this discussion, so I thought I’d take some time to explain why it was important that the education market got this first.

In 2016, Apple introduced the Managed Apple ID account as a school-created and school-owned Apple ID that provides access to Apple services and caters to the privacy and security needs of schools. Using this special type of Apple ID, schools could create as many Apple ID for students as needed without the hassle of doing it through the normal process.¹ Most importantly, Managed Apple ID accounts have no way to purchase anything in the App Store, iBooks Store, iTunes, Apple Music or ApplePay. You can read more about Managed Apple ID here.

While the benefits of Managed Apple ID sound pretty good on paper, the inability to access commerce can quickly become an issue in actual use. Managed Apple ID, just like a standard Apple ID, come with only 5GB of iCloud storage space. The big difference is that unlike a regular Apple ID, Managed Apple ID has no option to purchase any additional storage. Neither the school that owns the account nor a parent with a credit card can purchase more storage on behalf of the student. Once a student exceeds the 5GB iCloud limit they are forced to either delete content to free up space, move the content to a competing cloud service or export it off the device by connecting it to a computer. A huge pain for students and quite an oversight on Apple’s behalf.

As someone that makes tech decisions for a large K-12 private school with a fairly large iPad deployment, this was one of the key reasons why we put off moving our students to Managed Apple ID school-wide when they were first introduced. While there are others factors that are keeping us from using Managed Apple ID that I won’t get into here, the move to increase iCloud storage to 200GB is a positive and much needed step in the right direction. But I have to wonder what took Apple so long? Two years is a long time to wait for something that seems so vital.

While it was refreshing to hear others who are not in the education field share their thoughts and opinions about what Apple should be doing in this space, every conversation I read or listened to made me feel a little uneasy and it took me a while to figure out why.

It finally hit me when Rene Ritchie called this event a “Love letter to education” during his Vector podcast. He decribes Apple courting the education market as “Long on romance but short on details. ‘Come on! Run away with me! Get in the car and I’ll figure out where we’re going later.’” type of relationship. Perhaps thats the message that Apple was trying to get across but I think for many of us in the education technology field, it’s going to take a lot more than an Apple Pencil and a more affordable iPad to sweep us off our feet but more importantly, regain our trust.

A good relationship requires communication; a lasting one requires commitment. It often feels like Apple’s not interested in either. It can feel like being in a relationship where your partner tells you they’re all-in with you but is constantly distracted or even ignores you. Mixed signals can cause doubt and frustration in any relationship and this event reminded me of that.

Apple is secretive about a lot of things and I don’t expect that to change. I’ve become quite adept in the fine art of reading the Apple tea leaves and navigating the upcoming product crystal ball. But while keeping secrets is great for making an Apple event exciting, it’s not so great when you’re an IT administrator or department head that depends on Apple’s hardware and software roadmap to make future decisions for their company or team. With Apple, it always feels like a one-sided relationship where we’re left to wait, wonder and hope that they’ll give us a sign that they’re still interested in supporting what we do. The Mac Pro reset debacle is a perfect example of the professional market feeling left out in the cold and wondering if Apple still cared about them.

Apple’s commitment can also feel one-sided. Schools commit to Apple by purchasing a fleet of iPads and Macs with the hopes that Apple will support that hardware with great software and services. The reality is that Apple has software that is rarely updated and minimal services that don’t get much attention either. It feel like their solution is for IT administrators to fill that void with third-party applications, tools and services that it doesn’t provide.

Want to manage all that hardware you just bought? Get JAMF Casper to do your Mobile Device Management. Want a place to store all that content you’re creating on your Mac or iPad? Buy some Dropbox storage or use Google Drive because Managed Apple ID has no way to purchase more iCloud storage from Apple. Looking for a Learning Management System? Subscribe to an app like Showbie or SeeSaw. Do you see a pattern? This isn’t to disparage any of the third-parties mentioned as my school currently depends on each of them to fill in the gaps that Apple won’t. However, all of those services cost money and can quickly add up to a significant amount spent year-over-year. Don’t get me wrong. It’s great to have choices in this space, but it’s hard to take Apple seriously when they don’t have any first-party solutions in these areas for the education market.

By comparison, Google with Chromebooks combined with GSuite for Education gives you an email account, unlimited file and media storage in Google Drive, a place for hosting student created web content in Google Sites, ability to use Google Accounts as a single sign-on for various services, constantly upgraded collaboration in Google Docs, Sheets and Slides and so much more for free. It’s a shame that schools that use Apple’s hardware need to depend on Google’s GSuite for many of the services Apple doesn’t provide. There are administrators that would love to go all in on Apple, especially because of their focus on privacy, but without integrated services, they need to lean on third parties which can render Apple’s strength in privacy moot.

My point is that even if my school wanted to go all-in with Apple, we simply can’t. It feels as if Apple has no desire to take care of the entire eco-system when it comes to education technology.

So what can Apple do to regain trust? While it’s important that Apple focus on teachers, they also need to listen to the needs of the people charged with making sure technology works in schools, namely the education technology and IT teams. These are the teams that make the hardware, software and purchasing decisions. At the very least, Apple should listen to their own Systems Engineers that works hand in hand with these teams. They’re the closest thing Apple has to having eyes and ears on the front lines in schools.²

Apple needs to have periodic updates to their software lineup instead of waiting to do one every year or two. It sometimes feels like the iWork suite never gets updated. I’d rather have regular maintenance releases and smaller improvements vs. ground breaking features that push back the release cycle. Regular updates to Apple’s own software will signal to education technologists that Apple cares enough to keep polishing and refining these apps.

Next, Apple should consider creating first party services instead of ceding it all to third-parties. Apple is already part way there on the Learning Management System (LMS) front with Classroom. The addition of an Apple branded Mobile Device Management (MDM), Student Information System (SIS) and the upcoming Schoolwork app would be a complete package and a good alternative for schools that want to go with Apple hardware but may not be able to afford all of the third party services needed to deploy it.

Finally, please escalate critical updates and release them as soon as humanly possible when something breaks. A software update messing up your personal device can be a pain but it’s an issue that only affects you. When you’re managing 1600+ devices, you want to be damn sure that your end users won’t have the same issue you’re having.

Fellow education technologist Bradley Chambers showcases what can happen to any iOS deployment when an update breaks something that educators depend on.³ These are the kinds of issues that can cost institutions not just time, but money and sadly we’ve had a number of them. Yes, you can report these issues to an Apple Engineer, but it can be nerve wracking when there’s no ETA or even an acknowledgement that a fix is coming. It can feel like your trouble ticket has been launched into a black hole with no solution in sight. It’s issues like this that make me more gun-shy than ever to ask my team to push out any new software update before it’s been thoroughly tested by a large number of people first. Once a situation like this happens to your entire deployment and you’re faced with a long line of students outside of your office, you’ll think long and hard before pressing that update button.

No relationship is perfect. If you care about the relationship, you work through the hard times. I’m hoping that Apple is willing to work and listen to not just educators, but the education technologist that support their products in schools as well.

1. Creating an Apple ID is a complicated task as is. Asking parents to create an Apple ID for their child so they can use it with a school supplied iPad takes an incredible amount of effort on the parents part. Add in the extra steps needed to make an account without needing to add a credit card and you’ve reached the point where you might as well create the Apple ID for them. Please don’t ask me how I know this, but it’s true. ↩︎

2. At my school, we’re very fortunate to have an awesome Apple Systems Engineer that we can connect with in the State of Hawaii. We give him a _lot_ of feedback, especially when things go wrong. ↩︎

3. While I was finishing this article, Bradley Chambers reported that JAMF had an update to this issue. Seems like it was Apple’s fault ↩︎