lynnfredricks.com

Recently visiting my daughter’s high school and their newly remodeled media focused building, I came to the realization that Apple has completely given up on teaching programming to kids. This will come to many as a complete surprise since Apple has a reputation for being the best solution for the K-12 market.For historical reasons, Apple has long been a friend to education. I cut my nerd teeth on Apple IIs and BASIC back in the 1980s, later using Apple IIGS for grading students papers when I got my teaching certificate. I have fond memories of parent-teacher conferences where I sat down with parents with a 20 page visual report showing their child’s progress (or poor grades from not doing their homework).

The Mac was well loved even then in education and delightfully pushed the old Apple IIs out of schools. Fast forward to 2010, a parent myself, with a teen even going to my own alma mater.  After a conference, I stepped over to the beautiful new computer room and noticed it was full of Apple eMacs. These were G4 based (non-Intel) iMacs that were specifically for the education market – serviceable machines that especially had price going for them.  Now and then I use an old G4 based Mac Mini for web surfing (and testing out PPC based software) and it remains a very viable computer.

Now here is the problem, actually two problems – Apple xCode 3.2.X and higher (released in March 2010)  require an Intel based Mac running Mac OS X 10.6.  Just based on hardware specs, the K-12 market is in trouble, however consider the operating system requirements in addition to this. Many shipped with OS 9.2 and an early version of Mac OS X – 10.1.4. The eMac can run Mac OS X 10.5, which makes it possible to use xCode 3.1.x. However several iterations of xCode also require Mac OS X 10.5. This means there have been at least one or more paid for OS system updates  which may not be present on K-12 Macs. Apple wants its developers running the most recent versions of Mac OS X, and if you check backwards compatibility, usually only two versions back of the OS than the then current OS. For example, you are going to have a lot of trouble supporting an OS version earlier than 10.4 if you use the present kit.

So the options are bleak if you want to stick with Apple only tools. If you are using one of these old Macs (like so many K-12 schools are), they can, at best, run only older versions of xCode. And that in turn means your programming course cannot include development for the iPhone too.