Lion and the student

With Lion coming up in a couple of weeks we all now know the good and the bad. I’ll leave that for discussion. What I would like to talk about is how Lion can benefit certain groups of consumers - in particular students. 

I really think Apple has had this group of consumers in mind, and that is not a bad move. Students are a big chunk of their customer base, especially in the laptop segment. Integrating certain features into Lion is a great move to even extend this consumer base - and augment the customer experience in general.

Of course, most of the features are made for the masses and not only for the students. Just look at the revamped mail.app, Airdrop, resume or many more. But this doesn’t mean some features are especially targeted at a certain group of consumers.

When Apple announced features like Version or Auto Save, it really stroke me with the thought: “This is really made for students or writers”. The ability to look into previous versions of your work is a great addition for anybody who is creating documents, spreadsheets and more. In the case of students, writing a paper for a certain course can take several weeks or months, depending on the deadline. The ability to see all the changes you made during that time can really be a plus. Sometimes you delete pieces of text or images because it doesn’t fit in that current “state” of the document. The power that lies in Versions that it’s not deleted but, lets say, archived. And this is a big advantage. When you need that piece of text you wrote in the beginning or the fancy image you used you just go back and copy it and integrate it into your latest version. Its like fine-tuning your document. Anybody who is writing text or something similar will benefit from this feature, I am sure of it, and Apple thinks that too. Of course, the same goes for Auto Save. Imagine that you will never lose your documents again because you simply forgot to save it. Loosing a big chunk of your paper is not the best day of your life. Mechanisms like this will spare us the frustrations and the panic of loosing content. 

It all lies in the philosophy of Apple. It just works. We don’t have to do anything, it’s been done for us. And Lion goes a step further with these kind of features. 

The Back To School promo may prove my thoughts. It proves that Apple is indeed targeting the students. Giving students a 100 dollar gift card is also a very good idea of Apple. Apple as well as the students will gain from this promo. Apple with the 30% cut and students of course with 100$ of apps and music.

We cannot underestimate the Mac App Store in all this. It is a great way to find and buy apps or games. When it comes to the students, there are a ton of great apps to download. 100$ is a very welcoming gift.

I am convinced that Lion will help me as a student, I hope Lion will help you too, whatever your kind of work is. 

  1. baeten posted this