Well, this is just sad. I went to erase a hard drive tonight and noticed something in OS X El Capitan’s new version of Disk Utility:

Here’s what the Erase sheet says:

Erasing “Time Machine” will destroy of all the data stored on it. Enter a name, choose a format.

In addition to the text being so brief it feels incomplete, it has two grammatical errors:

1. The first sentence should read “….destroy all of the data.” It currently transposes “all” and “of.”
2. “Enter a name, choose a format” is a comma splice. Break it into two sentences or use a semicolon.

While this may seem silly, it’s this attention to detail stuff that worries me about Apple software.

I filed a radar.

A couple of weeks ago, this happened on Twitter:

While I’m pretty meh on his new album, Kanye’s tweets did remind of an Apple event and initiative that feels older than it really is.

In January 2012, in New York City, Apple held a small event to discuss textbooks and the iPad.

Apple built the case that American students are falling behind due to a wide range of challenges that the lack of modern tools and technology could address. In a world of laptops and smart phones at home, the classroom felt out of date, according to the company. Student engagement, Phil Schiller said, was an area that Apple could help with using its products.

The iPad had been out for less than two years, but was already in use in some classrooms. The iBookstore had textbooks and other education materials for sale, but there was no real support for teachers or administrators wanting to leverage the iPad in new ways.

In the event, Apple laid out two initiatives.

Reinventing Textbooks: iBooks Author

Schiller argued that textbooks weren’t ideal in our modern world in what may be my favorite slide Apple has ever used during an event:

The iPad was portable, durable, interactive, searchable and could show new and fresh content, but until this event, there wasn’t a great way to get educational content onto the iPad.

Enter iBooks Author.

A clear offshoot of the iWork applications, iBooks Author is a Mac OS X application that allowed for the design and assembly of iPad textbooks. Text content could be enhanced with videos, photo tours and widgets. Students could highlight content, make notes and create flashcards. All of this was searchable, and easily scannable thanks to navigation complete with page thumbnails.

Books created in iBookstore could be downloaded from the iBookstore right alongside books from mainstream publishers. To keep prices down, Apple made iBooks Author free, and imposed a $14.99 price ceiling for textbooks in the Store.

This application allowed anyone to create a book, and I think the hope was that schools and teachers would create custom-built books for their classrooms. Of course, Apple also announced partnerships with major textbook publishers including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Pearson, and McGraw Hill.

I don’t think this plan has worked out quite as well as Apple had hoped. iBooks Author has been used by all sorts of people on all sorts of things, but in talking with Fraser Speirs, the entire idea has a critical flaw at its center:

The iPad is far too valuable in the classroom to lock it up as a textbook.

Speirs — who deployed and runs the world’s first whole-school 1:1 iPad program — went on to point out that while textbooks are expensive here in the United States, that’s not true everywhere around the world. While cheap textbooks may help offset the cost of an iPad for us, it’s just not true elsewhere.

Over the years, Apple has made its book and device management tools more robust, but they are far from perfect. Most notably, iBooks Author hasn’t evolved as much as some would like. Here is Speirs again:

iBooks Author hasn’t taken off like we expected. I suspect in part because it runs on a Mac and most schools worldwide don’t have Macs, but do have iOS devices. iBooks Author should really be on iOS.

It’s surprising to me that iBooks Author has not made the jump to iOS, especially with the introduction of the iPad Pro. It seems like such a natural fit, but my guess is that Cupertino has deprioritized development on the tool since the program isn’t as important as its iWork siblings.

Textbooks on the iPad was just one part of the story, however, and the second one is much more popular with educators like Speirs.

Reinventing Curriculum: iTunes U

iTunes U is a much harder platform to describe than iBooks Author. It existed before this event as a way for educators to share audio and video of their lessons with people via the iTunes Store. The company boasted 700 million downloads at the time of the event.

At this event, Apple launched iTunes U as an iPad app. Educators could now publish entire online courses, albeit in a design that looks much older than its 4 years:

Students — or anyone in the world with an iPad, really — could use go through an entire course, with content from iBooks Author books, custom videos, audio, PDFs and more. iTunes U gathered notes from books and other sources all in one place, acting as a complete hub for a digital course.

iTunes U is still around, and has expanded to include support for homework, private discussions, grading and more. “iTunes U goes from strength to strength,” Speirs told me. “It’s something I depend on every day to manage my classroom.”

The Path Forward

Apple has always held education in high regard. As far back as the Apple II, the company has worked hard to puts its products in the hands of children to enhance their education experiences.

Today, however, the company is in a fight for the classroom. With low-cost Chromebooks, Google is making great inroads across the country’s classrooms.

With iOS 9.3, Apple is firing back, adding to its tools to make the iPad a better citizen in schools. I believe education is still near to the heart of Apple, and I’m sure they’ll keep working to improve their offerings in the space. They’ve come a long way since 2012, that’s for sure, but I’m not sure their dream of digital textbooks will ever come true.

Mark Gurman reported last week that Apple’s next 9.7-inch iPad won’t be an “iPad Air 3,” but a smaller “iPad Pro,” complete with Pencil and Smart Keyboard support.

I tend to think the iPad name change is accurate. Looking at the Mac the line, it’s not hard to imagine the Air name going away anyway, but more importantly, bringing the Keyboard and Pencil to the 9.7-inch form factor down the line will give developers incentive to support the accessories and may help move people with older devices to purchase a new iPad.

Today, MacRumors’ Juli Clover writes that this year’s iPhone 7 and 7 Plus could have a top-tier sibling dubbed the “iPhone Pro.” This model is said to sport the dual-camera system that’s been making the rounds recently, while the poor man’s iPhone 7 Plus would feature as single shooter.

(For those keeping up at home, it means that the iPhone SE, iPhone 6S, 6S Plus, 7, 7 Plus and Pro could all be on sale this fall. That’s a lot of iPhones.)

Assumedly, the iPhone Pro would carry a larger price tag than the Plus, which has historically been $100 more than the smaller base-model. If the Pro is $200 more than the base model, it may help the ever-important iPhone average selling price.

I don’t feel nearly as good about this rumor as I do the iPad one. I had assumed up to this point that the dual-lens system would be like optical image stabilization and limited the more expensive Plus only.

Apple’s no stranger to making questionable decisions for a increased price tag, but I’m not sure this is a place where it would make sense from a product point of view. As a Plus user, I’m already used to paying a little bit more for a larger screen and better low-light camera performance.

I’m sure that Apple would build the case for why the two-lens camera is worth the money, but there’s a worry in the back of my mind that Apple would be trying to inject new life into the iPhone ASP on the backs of its most passionate users.

Dan Moren, at Six Colors:

The problem with the Apple Watch is that we’re being asked to strap something to our wrist—to attach it to our very body—without it delivering on the corresponding promise that it will be much faster to use than our phones. The stale data and the lack of speed means that either you have to stare at your Watch for several seconds and hope the data updates; or tap on the complication to load the Watch app, which as we all know takes a good long while as well; or simply give up and pull out your phone.

It’s not just that the Apple Watch is slow; it’s that it’s slow while promising to be faster.

I’ve more or less given up on this generation of Apple Watch ever being fast enough to not be frustrating at times. Native apps helped, but I really think it’s going to take a hardware revision to make this better.

Matthew Panzarino:

“In order to comply with the Gov’t demands, Apple would need to create a new “GovtOS” and FBI forensics lab on site that has the potential to be used on hundreds of phones now in law enforcements possession in conflict with existing law as well as the First and Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution,” says Apple in the act.

Apple also states that the request violates Apple’s constitutional rights. The demand violates Apple’s First Amendment rights against compelled speech and viewpoint discrimination. Apple wrote code for its operating system that reflects Apple’s strong view about consumer security and privacy. By forcing Apple to write software that would undermine those values, the government seeks to compel Apple’s speech and to force Apple to express the government’s viewpoint on security and privacy instead of its own.

The motion can be read here, and even though I’m no lawyer, I think Apple’s points are made pretty clearly here. This is how the motion is opened:

This is not a case about one isolated iPhone. Rather, this case is about the Department of Justice and the FBI seeking through the courts a dangerous power that Congress and the American people have withheld: the ability to force companies like Apple to undermine the basic security and privacy interests of hundreds of millions of individuals around the globe.

The government demands that Apple create a back door to defeat the encryption on the iPhone, making its users’ most confidential and personal information vulnerable to hackers, identity thieves, hostile foreign agents, and unwarranted government surveillance. The All Writs Act, first enacted in 1789 and on which the government bases its entire case, “does not give the district court a roving commission” to conscript and commandeer Apple in this manner.

In fact, no court has ever authorized what the government now seeks, no law supports such unlimited and sweeping use of the judicial process, and the Constitution forbids it.