Wharton School of The University of Pennsylvania offers custom engraved iPads to students
If you're heading back to school, attend the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and need to buy an iPad, you can pick up one with the school's logo engraved on the back.
iPad engraving has been offered since October 2010 and has since begun to offer logo etching for corporations, and Wharton worked with Apple to produce a custom-branded 32 GB Wi-Fi iPad that's available for current students and staff. Dan Alig, the Wharton School's senior IT director, said that it's been working with Apple for the past two years to deploy branded iPads to the school's executive MBA program.
"Because it's a fully funded program, we buy the units on the student's behalf," Alig said. "The goal of the pilot was to enable a very mobile student population with a more portable version of their course material."
After seeing the pilot-program students with the custom iPads, other students, faculty and alumni began inquiring about purchasing them. Because the logo engraving is only available for bulk institutional orders, Alig said, Apple worked with Wharton and campus reseller Penn Computer Connection to make the custom iPads available for sale.
In addition to the engraving, the Wharton iPads have customized lock screens and desktop backgrounds, the school's branding video in the video library, the support office in the Contacts app and a number of Safari bookmarks geared toward helping students.
Current students and faculty can purchase the Wharton iPad through Penn Computer Connection, and the Wharton School plans to work with its alumni relations team to try to make it available for alumni.
