Microsoft is making its play for the new shape of classrooms with a pared-down version of Windows 11 and a set of inexpensive laptops from the Surface brand and several other manufacturers. It’s clear they’ve got Google’s popular Chromebooks in their sights, and their partners seem to be hedging their bets as well.
Before all that, let’s just establish that “SE” doesn’t stand for anything, unlike the SE in Windows 98 SE (“second edition”) or the iPhone SE (“special edition”) or the Macintosh SE (“system expansion”). The SE is “intended to clearly differentiate it from other editions like Home and Pro,” Microsoft told me, though why the they didn’t just say it stands for “Students and Educators” instead of being a completely meaningless initialism is beyond me. (Yes, Microsoft, you can steal that.)
Whatever the origin of its name, the Surface Laptop SE we may take to be the platonic shape or
