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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?
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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I'll be darned. Cheapest product sells more units. I wonder who's making the most money?
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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But it will run games using Java and WebGL.
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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.
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.
I think the $99 netbooks that are gonna be coming out this fall should just suck up these low end sales like a sponge. After all the new Atom and Jaguar chips are crazy powerful and at 8 inches it'll be just perfect for kids sticking into backpacks. i already have a dozen customers that have put off getting their kids a tablet to get one of these new netbooks and I have a feeling that without having the lowest cost these ChromeOS sales are gonna dry up, same goes for the low end tablets.
After all why would you buy a Chromebook that ONLY works on the net when you could have a netbook that runs all the apps a Chromebook can run AND run offline as well? Oh and the Linux guys should love 'em as both Intel and AMD have been pretty good about opening up the APUs so it should be a dirt cheap way to have a pocket Linux lappy.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Managers where I work usually get iPads.
All they can do in addition to Facebook and other web browsing is browse the intranet (which nobody really does anyway) and check email. They already get emails on their Blackberry's and use them more often.
Pretty much a corporate toy.
That's interesting as we are actually having the opposite to your experience in the school I work at.
The teachers (mostly) think they are great
Before students had these devices they had pen and paper. Now they have a device that does word processing, spreadsheets, basic multimedia, communication (email, video chat etc), has access to a wealth of information through the internet for research, access to our online learning environment and more. A lot of activities that are great for education across every subject and that they couldn't do prior with pen and paper. And it does all these activities rather well and because it is low powered it easily lasts a whole day without recharging (with the model we have). This last point is really important as it alleviates the problem of a mess of cables for people to trip over etc but it also allows people to move around a lot easier than when they are tethered which is good for collaboration exercises.
Of course it doesn't do cad and multimedia and all that other fancy stuff. That is what our labs are for and in our opinion a desktop with a 20 something inch screen and a mouse and that is plugged into power permanently is much better for doing those tasks than even a high end laptop.
Actually you can do cad and multimedia and a lot of that other stuff on these devices. There are web based options for many of these things. Sure they aren't as powerful but for teaching the theory and concepts you shouldn't need the full blown tools (unless you are a poor teacher who doesn't understand the theory and concepts well enough and can only teach a product which you yourselves were taught on.) For instance we teach students cad with Tinkercad.com and they easily transfer those skills over to AutoCad in later years.
From a management point of view they are awesome. Way fewer breakdowns than with traditional laptops and when they do, a lot of the time a Power Wash and the student is back up and running in a matter of minutes. If it's hardware we loan them another device, they log in and are off and running again in a few minutes, and again when they get their repaired device (or a replacement) back.
I really hate this argument that a device that is easy to manage and offers many things they didn't have before (with just pen and paper) which are of value and which this device does really well, and is actually quite well priced, is useless because it doesn't do some other things which are specialised and for which we already have better devices doing those tasks anyways.
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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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> There's a reason GDocs is free...
Yes there is. It's a solved problem. It was a solved problem 20 years ago. It's simply not a task that anyone should be paying money for anymore.
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