Apple reveals new education focused iPad (Video)

Forbes -- Apple finally stepped down from the gilded rose gold throne of luxury tablets and sleek, polished laptops to gingerly walk among the commoners at its education event today. With its well fed hand outstretched, each finger adorned with the trophies of past successes, Apple gifted the serfs a pittance. Lower cost iPads with software and services to support an education alternative to the current lord of the classroom, Chromebook.

As quickly as Apple walked among the people, it scuttled back into the depths of its kingdom, leaving some scraps behind for tech journalists to paw. The revitalized 9.7 inch iPad will support nearly 200,000 apps optimized for education to directly compete with Google Android based tablets that punched into schools by getting educators hooked on the software suite first. The education event put a heavy focus on augmented reality apps for education as well as sharing creative projects and the iWork suite.

The new iPad is priced at $299 (for schools, $329 for consumers), to directly compete with cheap Google tablets. Also, it will have Apple Pencil stylus support and new software to take advantage of the magic pencil stick thing. Apple also dropped an educational development framework called ClassKit. ClassKit will allow developers to create more educational focused apps, but we'll just end up with some HQ Triva clone instead.