- The school goes to a supplier and order 500 iPads and says they want them preloaded with X and X apps and be centrally managed by their Device Management software.
I love Linux, but nobody is creating Linux tablets and supplying them to schools at discounted rates and pre-configuring them with MDM ready out of the box.
But sometimes a totally dumb and closed system like an iPad is a feature. It is so simple that Students (from 10 to 19 years old) and teachers (from 25 to 70) can use it. It is so closed down that the teachers can easily and reliably distribute tasks, apps, restrictions and don't have to deal (they will stand no chance) with students tampering with their systems.
It would be great when all school subjects would address FOSS and the impact of closed systems on society but they also have to address their core curriculum. Here I see the possibilities that the iPad opens up as a net positive.
i still tangle my head till today when proprietary musical software discussions emerge, on HN that's even more surprising, and no Csound, pd is cited even when those have decades old mature and updated codebases, with efficient DSP programmed by academics, all free of price with very permissive licenses - Bitwig costs 399 USD and that's like a lot for a lot of people - that's just a silly example, i'm not even getting into ed. tech software (for educators or kids) ecosystem which sometimes i still have a hard time why someone don't just learn Emacs org-mode for 1 week and stop using N services their school have to pay a subscription... Apple hardware, often deprecated much faster than hardware which run libre software, isn't a great monkey-see-monkey-do example on how teaching how important is rights of repair and permacomputing principles