My office is all Apple. We use the AppleTV connected to all of the monitors and TVs around the office and in conference rooms for Airplay during presentations and to run dashboards. They just work since all of our hardware is Apple. Lots of schools use them for the same reason. From that perspective, it’s a reasonable price to pay.
Business is a different matter entirely, although even there a Chromecast makes a lot more sense unless you’re presenting from your iPhone.
And yes of course, if you’re invested in Apple’s ecosystem you have no choice at all.
Many (most?) schools are invested in the Apple ecosystem. I’m not trying to defend their pricing. I don’t have a 4K TV and probably won’t for 5+ yrs (don’t watch much TV), so I’m meh on the whole thing. I have last year’s AppleTV and really like it, though.
Schools buy iTunes movies? I didn’t realize that was a thing.
If you mean they use macs and give iPhones to administrators, that isn’t a reason to get an appletv when a cheapo Chromecast works just fine.
Well, all I can give is my personal experience here and report that for the school where I sit on the Board of Trustees, their Apple Education package/program gives them discounts and incentives for using the Apple devices. Between the unified support and ability to work with laptop leasing, etc., it’s an advantage for them to stay in the ecosystem. Whether that’s true elsewhere, I don’t know.
So those incentives make a $200 appletv the same price as a $35 chromecast?
Maybe? There’s zero configuration once the AppleTV is set up, so it means they don’t need an IT person around to manage their hardware.
I work in higher ed. The Appletv’s provide easy av content broadcast to the display devices (projectors, large screen tv’s and so on) from a student population that’s ~80% Apple ecosystem and a faculty population that’s ~60% Apple ecosystem (and really, for mobile, the faculty are ~80% Apple. Still a lot of windows laptops though). For us, it’s much less about the price of the Appletv’s and all about the support costs of providing alternatives. The real costs are in the ~40% of the faculty that require an alternative to the Appletv’s.
That rings true with both my job and the school I’m talking about. We don’t have an IT person at work. The only non-Apple machine we have is in our VR room. At the school, with 430+ students, there are no on-site IT people. While I totally agree that you can argue the merits of it, because they’re 100% Apple, they simply don’t need a person hanging around because they rarely run into issues that require a person on site. They contract to a local company that manages most stuff remotely and sends somebody over to the campus when there’s an issue and/or for routine checkups and maintenance. The annual cost of that is less than 1/2 of what it cost to pay on on-site IT person, which they used to do.
Chromecasting doesn’t exactly require 31337 hacking skillz. It’s every bit as easy as airplay.
Not to mention, Chromebooks are totally destroying in K-12 education. Apple isn’t even close. Teachers love it. Sharing over Google Drive means the dog can’t eat your homework.
I can only report what I see. We use A LOT of expensive Google services (GCS, etc.) at work and it is damn near impossible to get a support person on the phone.
That’s not an issue with Apple right now. I don’t have a problem with the Chromecast - was just trying to point out a few a the reasons why I think Apple (and the AppleTV) have been able to maintain a hold in education.
Of course, they use Google Apps for Education at the school. We use G Suite, Firebase, PubSub, Cloud SQL, BigQuery, lots of Compute Engine, Data Studio, and a lot more at work. We pay loads for it. Support is a room full of chirping crickets.
Mini-report on my 5th day of having the iPhone 8+, up from a Galaxy S5.
Siri is pretty great, honestly.
The App Store isn’t much different than the Google Play store.
Seriously, I can’t have free ringtones anymore? Well, whatever.
It’s holding its charge fine, it drains like any other phone.
I love the goddamn camera.
Sure you can, it’s a snap!
Download the MP3
Import it in to iTunes on your computer.
Convert it to AAC within iTunes.
Find the file on your computer.
Make a copy and rename the suffix (enabling show extensions in Windows explorer if disabled) from .m4a to .m4r
Drag the copy with m4r extension into iTunes, and it shows up as a ringtone.
Sync your iPhone with iTunes manually.
Et Voila! New Ringtone! It’s the slick Apple way!
For the record, on Android: download an Mp3 to your phone, and set it as a ringtone.
How many milliseconds does the A11 save during that process?
I don’t think that actually works any more since iTunes can’t do ringtones as of latest version, you use an app or something. I dunno because I do not give any shits about ringtones.
Yeah, I can see how you’d be defeated. How many extra milliseconds to change the WiFi network or Bluetooth device you’re connected to…? Nah, who cares about WiFi and Bluetooth.
If you buy phones based on the ringtone, more power to you sir. More power to you. God bless.
Bluetooth audio devices (realistically the only ones you change often) are now in the Control Center, albeit hidden in the “now playing” widget’s top right corner. So, maybe 1ms extra?
Wifi networks? Yeah, you’re right. That still requires going into settings. So, 2000ms extra.
The steps are slightly different; iTunes no longer keeps a copy of the ringtone in its library on your computer. But you can still connect your iPhone to your computer, open up iTunes, and then drag the ringtones files onto your iPhone through iTunes, transferring them directly.
Per the verge
Today, Apple quietly released iTunes version 12.7 for both Windows and macOS, and the most immediate change is that it no longer contains any options for syncing apps or ringtones to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.