I wouldn’t be all that surprised if the future of “personal” computing on non-phone devices (eg next 10-20 years) ends up looking like the Microsoft era, but with ChromeOS laptops in place of Windows, iPad/future large format iOS devices in the position of the Mac. I see a huge generation of kids in the US quite literally growing up with Chromebooks, it will be interesting to see if they keep using the platform as adults. The ease of switching device with ChromeOS is pretty remarkable really, the truest realisation of “the network is the computer” we’ve seen.

It’s pretty clear Apple don’t care hugely about losing marketshare in education as their recent still pretty expensive edu focused “cheap iPad” shows. They will enjoy what they always did, quality computing products for a small marketshare who are happy to pay high margins for it, leaving the other PC manufacturers to bloody battle over minuscule margins and hard to differentiate product.