Fanbois: The Next Generation. YOUR CHILDREN belong to Apple now One in two members of the next generation are Apple fans, a study by Nielson has revealed, showing that almost half of under-12s questioned want an iPad in the next six months. And that's a full-sized iPad too. Apple products make up four of the top five products on tot gadget wish lists as compiled by survey-makers Nielsen. …
At that age they pretty much want anything they see...
Mine wants a Wii and a Nintendo DS and a Xbox and a phone and a chemistry set and a dog and a lizard and a TV and a Keyboard and a guitar and keyboards and a....
All paid for by somebody else of course.
He'll make a briiliant MP when he grows up
"At that age they pretty much want anything they see..."
When the teacher asked us to make a Christmas List (aged 7) - my slate* was filled with 00 gauge model railway stuff like points and trackside lights etc. Just like the 1950s toy shop's Christmas display that we watched with our noses pressed to the window. At some point my big present was a Triang Rover "Princess Elizabeth" set. My spoiled neighbour had a Royal Mail set. Round and round it went - as we endlessly watched it picking up and dropping mail bags at full speed.
The Mamod steam engine was a periodic 7 day wonder. Can't see under-11's nowadays being allowed to use a meths burner and a boiler. Did I pester for that - or was my father fascinated by them too?
*forerunner of an iPad for writing and calculations - with rounded corners. The latter probably saved my life when a free-flying one connected with my head in class. Luckily it was also the advanced model made of compressed paper - rather than the eponymous slate.
Perhaps it's the fact that all the games that are based around kiddie franchises are somehow iDevice exclusives now. I haven't seen any new kiddie titles released on CD-ROM or DVD nowadays, only on tablets. And most of them seem to get published on Apple's iDevice store but not Google Play for some daft reason.
Apparently nobody in any of my (14 year old) sons classes brings an iPad into school. Meanwhile its around 90%+ in the neighbouring private school, very few android etc. according to the guy who looks after their wifi. If this is more than a local phenomenon, behind the general statistics there is quite a lot of polarisation here in the UK.
Interestingly at the comprehensive, among the boys iPhone is now thought of as old hat and Galaxy the device to aspire to late 2012. Girls still mainly keen Blackberry users but aspire to iPhone! Fun to observe the fashions changing. Few parents are daft enough to sign kids up to £30/month or so contracts however much the offspring pester. The Wii U doesn't seem to have grabbed imagination of the teens around here.
I plan to send my kids to private school, but the only Apple they are having is the kind you can eat!
Android tablet, maybe, Linux laptop is very likely,
I expect I will have to educate the ICT Teacher that windows is not the only OS on PC's, and that there are alternatives to MS Office...
Good luck with educating the ICT teachers.
I doubt you'll find private schools very receptive to anything different.
Being fortunate enough to have two local independents from the top 20 league table and the option of scholarship funding, we looked closely at private but ultimately went for the catchment comprehensive and more than happy we made the right call. Much better atmopsphere and attitude to learning, mixed abilities and coed makes for a far more normal upbringing. Academically, fact is the £14000 a year highly selective schools like to brag about their results but do the sums and the results from the top 15% of kids at out local comprehensive are just as good. Maybe you don't have the option of a good local state school but don't get seduced by the Daily Mail into thinking private is the best choice if you can afford it. Often its the opposite.
It would not surprise me at all that, in families where the under-12s are so shamelessly spoiled that they actually get high-end tablets or high-end mobile phones for Christmas, the children concerned would address an elderly white-bearded gentleman reindeer fondler in such a fashion.
And an iTunes/iCloud account has no such stipulations?
In fact they're only just announcing "school" accounts since legally the kids can't install anything because it requires an iTunes account.
It's also to combat poorer schools registering 15 iPads under one iTunes account and buying 2 copies of an app to cover a group of 30 kids with an iPad each. Functionally it works, but Apple hate it contravening their licensing. It may also have something to do with private schools doing it too when they can get away with it.
BTW I work with an Apple-based school (other than AirPorts, there's not an Apple product we don't use)
This is based on actual observation....
Both our 12 (lass) and 14 (lad) year old's think Apple's fondle-slabs "look a bit boring". Both have had iPod Touches for ages and I thought both would want "proper iPads" and nothing else, but to my surprise this hasn't been the case.
The 14 year old has an original Motorola Xoom. He got that instead of an iPad because the price of the iPad was just a bit too rich for us; I feared (read: hoped) he might not use it after a while because it didn't have an Apple badge, and I'd get it as a hand-me-down :). But no luck, you can't prise the bloody thing out of his paws and there was definitely no look of quiet disappointment when he unwrapped it on xmas day. The most important factor to him was that it was a tablet, who made it didn't actually matter. Can he Skype? check, Can he watch Minecraft and BF3 videos on YouTube?: Check, Email: Check...
Our 12 year old actually *asked* for a Samsung Galaxy Note (the one with the stylus) over an iPad, this was with no prompting, Samsungs adverts and googling made her mind up. Quite a surprise (and a relief wallet-wise) really. As with the Xoom it's been a massive hit and you rarely see her without it.
In both cases I set up a DNLA server with a library of all their fav films and telly stuff and they're happy as larry.
@Manolo mentioned that a lot of kids that age (circa 12'ish and younger) tend to use the term iPad generically and I think that's true. The main requirement of a slab is not what logo it wears, or whether it has a "retina display", but whether does all the things a ~12-14 year old needs it to do...Skype, YouTube, Email, Facebook (yeah I know, but we have their passwords), Angry Birds or whatever the game of the week is, play movies/Big Bang Theory.
In summary, kids do want "iPads" but I think the Apple logo is optional.
Back in my schools days the whole schools IT system was totaly apple based. What a waste of time that was appletalk, smalltalk ect ect. Ahh the painfull memories of the crappy Macintosh SE and iMac thank god they replaced them with PCs. Guess was the company I got my first job was using.
To be honest a mix of tech should be in schools. For my job i need to know a fair bit about linux and windows server. In a pure mac school where would i get this experiance? I very very higly doubt the mac will ever make a dent in the market share of windows server and linux in the server department.
Its almost as bad as exclusivly teaching MS word and Excel.
Christmas Day never seems the same when the weather is in the 80's, so we put the Christmas vacation over until Tet, it runs until February 12, and often stores have a bit of a New Years discount.
So we get to save a little. The iPhone knock off from China, it uses the iOS6-JB, seems to be the hot item this year and it's displays Vietnamese with the correct diacritical marks. comes in a rainbow of colours, too. Guess someone has made off with the molds to squeeze the plastic for V4S - or someone's been working an unofficial night shift.
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