I can't understand why Apple doesn't make a fanless Mini. There's a respectable market for fanless NUCs, and the original Mini was a great machine. Plus, it's a cheap entry level to the Apple ecosystem.
Modern Apple in a nutshell, really.
Re: screens, students are really rough on equipment, and laminated screens like those in iPad Air 2 and iPad Pro are quite expensive to replace. The iPad has the glass/digitizer separated from the screen which lowers repair costs significantly.
That being said with the ending of Airports and Apple branded displays it appears first party accesories arent as important as I thought. I’m not entirely sure why it’s being left to stagnate.
The iPad at $329 is an odd exception to Apple’s typical rules, I’ll admit. There’s a large price divide between it and the iPad Pro without there being a comparatively huge feature divide, making it kind of unique in Apple’s lineup.
I don't want to shell out like $1200 for a dumb macbook that I don't use, but I would be happy to shell out $500 for a Keynote machine.
For me, Keynote/Pages are the killer apps that only macOS has. iMessage/FT is the killer app that the Apple ecosystem has. Having a cheap entry to them is a great idea.
If you want your slides to be minimal and clean and you don't have a lot of time to do, then Markdown works. To me, over time I am convinced that having the ability to do animations to explain technical ideas is great. While it's not impossible to do fly in/out/moving animations in LaTEX, presentation software makes it ten times easier to maintain.
I think that not everything is best explained in code. Sometimes you need pictures/animations to convey the ideas.
Do you have an example slide? Just trying to understand what you mean.
https://giphy.com/gifs/4GXOwrfX1p9SuzbGzS/fullscreen
Sorry, the slide is clipped for some reason, but that's because I don't know how to configure OBS. It's not the best illustration ever, but you probably get the idea.
Here is an animation that isn't mine and I think it's really well done to explain a hard idea (not necessarily in PPT):
(also, the 8-bit guy is great!)
... which can be quite an adventure if you get the latest generation & don't do this kind of stuff on a regular basis. You basically have to disassemble the whole machine!
Not much more than an expensive LEGO project, but with significantly fewer parts and usually more available documentation!
Pages is good, useable, nice, but not worth buying a Mac for.