Everyone's going to write about the red iPhone this week, so let me get it out of the way first: Apple put out a (PRODUCT)RED iPhone 7 and 7 Plus on Tuesday, glossy red aluminum, only in 128GB and 256GB, starting at $749. It's a nice looking phone. I don't really care about it. What I think is the actual story from that announcement is the other thing they slipped in alongside it, the new 9.7-inch iPad, and almost nobody's framing it the way I think it deserves to be framed.
Quick recap for anyone who missed it: Apple didn't do one of the big stadium keynotes for this. They held a comparatively quiet event Tuesday at a high school in Chicago, Lane Tech, aimed squarely at teachers and school IT people, not tech press. New iPad, same 9.7-inch size as the old Air 2 it replaces, but with the A9 chip out of the iPhone 6s, and it starts at $329. The Air 2 it's replacing started at $399. That's a $70 cut, and if you're a school district buying a cart of thirty of these for a classroom, $70 times thirty is a number that actually shows up in a budget meeting.
That's the part worth sitting with. Chromebooks have been quietly eating Apple's lunch in K-12 for a couple years now, mostly on price and mostly on the fact that a $200 Chromebook doesn't feel like a tragedy when a seventh grader drops it down a stairwell. Apple's answer here isn't a cheaper iPad Pro or some stripped-down education-only SKU with a dumb name, it's just: take the mainstream iPad, cut $70 off it, put it in a room full of teachers, done. No fanfare, no "one more thing," just a price that changes the math for a purchasing department.
I still have my original iPad 2 in a drawer somewhere, from back when this blog was maybe six months old. It doesn't really do anything useful anymore, most apps have long since stopped updating for it, but I keep meaning to wipe it and give it to my nephew for watching cartoons on car trips. Never quite get around to it. Anyway, the point is the iPad has always had this weird split identity, it's either the coolest thing you own or a $500 YouTube machine gathering dust, and Apple pricing the entry model at $329 feels like the first real acknowledgment that most people just want the cheap version and that's fine.
There was also a small app called Clips shown off at the same event, one-tap video editing with animated captions and stickers, aimed pretty transparently at people who make stuff for Snapchat and Instagram Stories. It's not out yet, coming in April they said. I'm mildly curious about it but I've been burned before by Apple's "fun creative app" releases (remember Music Memos? does anyone remember Music Memos?) so I'll believe it's good when I've actually used it for a week.
None of this is a huge story on its own. Nobody's stock moved dramatically, nobody's writing "Apple event live blog" traffic-farming posts about a press release with no keynote video attached. But I think it's a more honest signal about where Apple's actually worried than the red phone is. Red iPhones sell to people who were already going to buy an iPhone. A $70 price cut aimed at school administrators is Apple looking at a market they've been slowly losing and deciding to just compete on the number instead of the story, for once.
New iPad ships Friday, for anyone keeping track. I'm not buying one, my iPad Air 1 is still fine for what I use it for, mostly reading in bed and losing to my brother at some word game. But I'll be curious in six months whether school orders actually move because of the seventy bucks, or whether Chromebooks have already won that fight regardless of what Apple charges.