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Chromebooks Are Outselling iPads In Schools
Nate the greatest (2261802) writes Apple thrilled investors earlier this week when they revealed that they had sold 13 million iPads to schools and claimed 85% of the educational tablet market, but that wasn't the whole story. It turns out that Apple has only sold 5 million iPads to schools since February 2013, or an average of less than a million tablets a quarter over 6 quarters. It turns out that instead of buying iPads, schools are buying Chromebooks. Google reported that a million Chromebooks were sold to schools last quarter, well over half of the 1.8 million units sold in the second quarter. With Android tablets getting better, Apple is losing market share in the consumer tablet market, and now it looks Apple is also losing the educational market to Google. Analysts are predicting that 5 million Chromebooks will be sold by the end of the year; how many of those will be sold to schools, do you think?
What are you gonna use for typing papers?
Just say'in.
That's probably a good thing since students shouldn't be static consumers of information and tablets are really subpar for most kinds of content creation. Add in the fact that a Chromebook costs half as much as even an ipad mini and overall the schools are probably making the rational choice.
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It's hardly surprising that schools would prefer laptops with keyboards, since students are expected to do a lot of writing. Chromebooks make sense because they are cheap, virus-proof and don't run Windows games.
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I'll be darned. Cheapest product sells more units. I wonder who's making the most money?
The tablets other companies are making are actual tools that people can use for productivity or enjoyment. iPads are nothing more than expensive toys.
Analysts are predicting that 5 million Chromebooks will be sold by the end of the year; how many of those will be sold to schools, do you think?
As a parent in a school district, I'm pissed that our school district is buying every student a Chomebook*.
I would be even angrier if they had gone with the iPad.
These programs are a bloody sham--they're a waste of money and will not help the education of our next generation one bit. There is nothing that providing a laptop per child affords that can't be accomplished through classroom media presentation devices (computer & projector) and a good school computer lab. These devices will only be a distraction and huge expense for families and schools as millions of them are broken every year.
*Our district is requiring that families pay for half, so I guess they're only half buying them and being dillholes toward us. I would be in favor of a program that provides these devices to low income families (and the district can pay for the whole thing).
Google's basically giving them away for free or extremely subsidized and then tries to make money from them by snooping on the kids' email, while Apple actually tries to make a profit from them.
http://thenextweb.com/google/2...
From http://www.edweek.org/ew/artic...
The plaintiffs allege that Google has employed such practices since around 2010, when it began using a new technology, known as Content Onebox, that allows the company to intercept and scan emails before they reach their intended recipients, rather than after messages are delivered to users’ inboxes, regardless of whether ads are turned off.
Mr. Fread and Mr. Carrillo say that neither they nor any other users of Google Apps for Education consented to such practices. They are seeking financial damages amounting to $100 per day of each day of violation for every individual who sent or received an email message using Google Apps for Education during a two-year period beginning in May 2011.
While the allegations by the plaintiffs are explosive, it’s the sworn declarations of Google representatives in response to their claims that have truly raised the eyebrows of observers and privacy experts.
Contrary to the company’s earlier public statements, Google representatives acknowledged in a September motion to dismiss the plaintiffs’ request for class certification that the company’s consumer-privacy policy applies to Apps for Education users. Thus, Google argues, it has students’ (and other Apps for Education users’) consent to scan and process their emails.
In November, Kyle C. Wong, a lawyer representing Google, also argued in a formal declaration submitted to the court in opposition to the plaintiffs’ motion for class certification that the company’s data-mining practices are widely known, and that the plaintiffs’ complaints that the scanning and processing of their emails was done secretly are thus invalid. Mr. Wong cited extensive media coverage about Google’s data mining of Gmail consumer users’ messages, as well as the disclosures made by numerous universities to their students about how Google Apps for Education functions.
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Probably Apple. But which one's more useful in the education setting? It certainly isn't the iPad or any other tablet.
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But it will run games using Java and WebGL.
The Amarri pray for god, the Caldari pray for profit. the Gallente pray for peace, but the Minmatar pray their ships hol
Although this information is interesting, unless someone does a survey or purchase poll it is difficult to infer why chrome is doing as well as it is. Since iPads are more expensive on average it would be difficult to control for price selection to determine any other user preference bias.
And pizza is more popular than fajitas in Beijing. So what?
It shows that there's an incline of purchase, not a descent.
Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
I hate to break it to you but web apps kickstarted the neo-mainframe movement because everyone having their own PC turned into an admin nightmare. Apple and Google have given the same thing to people who don't want to fight with their computer all the time.
USRobotics kept walking around and saying their modems were the #1 selling modem. This is analogous of what Apple is doing today.
However, while USR was the #1 brand, most modems sold overall had the Rockwell chipset, with most brands simply adding a plastic box and different color LEDs.
More recently, Apple claims that the iPhone is the #1 selling phone. However, phones that use Android sell the most, period.
I shouldn't be, but I'm always surprised how religious people get when their favorite electronics company is shown to be extremely misleading. I know a guy that I'd known for years who threatened to "unfriend" simply because I refuted his claim that the iPhone was the #1 phone.
So this iPad/Chromebook issue is just another chapter of misleading sales tactics. But if you look at what Apple actually says officially, they're very specific in the literature. Unfortunately, people will be blind to anything that might change their worldview... and any company would be nuts not to take advantage of that.
As a school administrator, there is only one reason that we go with Chromebooks across the industry: they're cheap. We don't have to worry about any kind of replacement cost, as it's cheaper to just buy a new one than try and fix them at all.
Teachers, at least at the high school level, hate Chromebooks because they are grossly underpowered. They don't interface with any of the science hardware or digital media products that most high schools use (Photoshop, anyone?). Sure, there are workarounds, but teachers don't want to have kludge together workarounds, they want guaranteed, tried and true solutions.
Students look at Chromebooks as a joke. They are toys that they get for free on someone else's dime. They can get a iPad or low cost Windows PC, on their own, load Chrome on it, and have a Chromebook that does so much more. Even in a low-income, high-needs district such as mine, kids are laughing at Chromebooks.
They'll be good for awhile, but Chromebooks need to come a long way before they'll be taken seriously by schools who really want to invest in technology.
You mean giving overprices, locked down, fragile nickel-and-dime machines that you can't type on to children isn't a good idea? I never would have guessed.
The last quarter was the second quarter. This doesn't show any sort of change in sales. It shows that out of 1.8 million units sold in the 2nd quarter, 1 million, or well over half of them, were to schools.
every freaking year they try to raise the wheel tax in my county (which goes to schools) cause the teachers cant buy fucking paper towels and tissues
meanwhile every tween is totally ignoring what is going on in class with their state issued internet gadgets
sigh
Any overpriced product has limited life
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I can not imagine homework is very practical without keyboard or trackpad. Chromebooks are also easy to pass along to next kid or share without privacy issues, and if they break down, like things in kids' hands often do, replacement is exceptionally cheap. Tablets for web browsing, visual tasks like photo editing, and casual games, laptops for heavy duty typing and bigger screen/multi application workflows.
There is a simple reason for this - economics. Early adopters went with iPads as they were really the only choice at the time. Now that the rest of the schools are going to jump on the bandwagon there are other choices and price comes into play. You can buy twice as many chromebooks as you can iPads for the same money.
Of course, that is assuming that their is educational software on the chromebooks that fit the students needs.
Chromebooks work fine offline too. You do have to change a setting in Google Docs to enable offline use, and perhaps Gmail also suffers from this flaw, but it is trivially possible. It is not the default, which is frankly bizarre, but I bought mine to be a backup web development machine, so it's running debian in a chroot.
I'd love a $99 netbook. My current one is getting up in years, but it's great for tossing into a messenger bag; it fits the ultra-mobile lifestyle very well. $99 is cheap enough to be disposable; I am sure they would sell like hotcakes. I wasn't able to find any information about them on a cursory search, do you have a link that you could share?
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I installed crouton and it totally sucks!
1) you have to run in developer mode which means one accidental miss boot or wake up and you entire hard disk is erased.
2) you get no live updates from google for the chrome portion
3) crouton linux has all sorts of network adapter problems, like seeing it at all, on my machine.
4) the archiving system for saving your current state for a reinistall after you accidentally press the space bar when it tells you to at boot (and reformats the hard drive) is byzantine and only for very serious experts who think there time has no value (e.g. want to buy a cheap computer and then waste tonnes of their time learing the tricks.
5) printing is a total disaster, and at a minumum requires a real computer or a special printer.
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Chromebook is perfect for the sort of people who don't understand the difference between a computer and the internet. The lack of ability to install anything you want (aka malware) with just a click is in this case a bonus.
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This trend doesn't surprise me at all. I have a chromebook I picked up earlier this year with the has well celeron in it. I used the developer mode and chrubuntu to turn it into a Linux machine. Eventually I realized I just was using the browser 99% of the time, so I reverted it back to chromeos ( which incidentally gets modestly better battery life than the xubuntu install I had, but I didn't invest the effort to do all the battery boosting tricks) I also bought a chromebox, and it is now running Linux mint and is my go to desktop machine when I am not doing something that needs the oophm of my i7 desktop and uses so little power that I just leave it on 24/7.
> everyone having their own PC turned into an admin nightmare.
This is entirely the fault of Microsoft. Apple itself used to even acknowledge this fact before it gave up on being a computer company. Remember those old commercials you never see anymore.
This was never a "PC problem". It was always a Microsoft problem. They poisoned the well.
A Chromebook is little more than a very locked down PC running Unix. Even an iPad is ultimately the same thing.
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What a bizarre story with some pretty wild speculation. You are trying to compare what you assume is a 5 quarter average to what Google claims to have sold to schools in the last quarter. You them claim Apple is losing the education market to Google. You do realize nothing at all in the brief article or anything you linked to supports that claim. The one thing we know for sure is that Apple has sold 13 million devices to schools since 2012 and Google has sold at least 1 million.