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Apple Losing Out To Microsoft and Google in US Classrooms (macrumors.com)
Apple is losing its grip on American classrooms, which technology companies have long used to hook students on their brands for life. From a report on MacRumors: According to research company Futuresource Consulting, in 2016 the number of devices in American classrooms that run iOS and macOS fell to third place behind both Google-powered laptops and Windows devices. Out of 12.6 million mobile devices shipped to primary and secondary schools in the U.S., Chromebooks accounted for 58 percent of the market, up from 50 percent in 2015. Meanwhile, school shipments of iPads and Mac laptops fell to 19 percent, from about 25 percent, over the same period, while Microsoft Windows laptops and tablets stayed relatively stable at about 22 percent.
I have the feeling price may be a factor here.
and not on professional tools anymore, ...
Chromebooks are so much easier to manage and maintain from the get-go, without having to purchase any other management software. Just using the G-Suite admin console lets us keep tens of thousands of these devices up to date, and with the necessary apps pushed out. Windows was a nightmare. We didn't even bother with Apple.
Back in the 80s Apple pioneered mainstream computing in classrooms. They had very active educational programs and, most importantly, did the accounting, training, and political legwork that made it easy for schools to adapt apple hardware.
A smart sales rep would sell the program to your board or state education department. You could send your teachers to training where they got their own computer to train on and take home.
They worked closely with the legendary MECC to help create those early educational titles of legend all kids of the 80s remember (some fondly)
Apple, now, doesn't do any of that stuff. Why? Who knows. Probably because they don't think it's worth their time and effort.
Google and Microsoft, on the other hand, are aggressively making it easy for Schools to acquire and manage cloud based services. Google in particular is a DREAM for a school IT department to manage thousands of Chromebooks through easy web based utilities.
Never tried to manage a bunch of devices on a network I see.. Remember, that IT guy is a cost center, not a profit maker in nearly all companies.
There are really good reasons to only have one flavor of device on your IT system, but it mostly boils down to being able to manage it with the least effort and staff.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
No school should accept to be vendor locked-in. Making all students to buy a device from a single vendor, buying (and maybe even developing) applications for that platform, and not being able to switch easily to another hardware provider is dumb.
Said the guy that has never had to provide technical services for a school.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Personally in IT and we have chromebooks (10k almost), iPads and PCs. Ipads by far are the hardest to manage and I think have the least instructional value.
-We can't afford an MDM like Casper or Meraki so I use Apple's half-baked profile manager software which is pretty terrible. I know it's more of less free, but if they cared about getting education market share they might want to come up with something a little better. Chromebook management model is an extra $35 for a lifetime license fee which is baked-in and much easier for the purchasers to swallow. Oh yea, free google apps as well and the google admin console is a DREAM. It also integrates with Active Directory via Google Apps Directory Sync and I have SSO set up with SimpleSamlPHP. It's awesome.
-Because I have a MDM that I'm constantly scared is going to crash (I've had to rebuild it twice trying to get app deployment to work, ultimately it didn't and couldn't get apple to figure out why) I don't trust using the Device Enrollment Program so you NEED a mac to use the configurator for initial setup. I would say Chromebooks are an order of magnitude faster to deploy.
-iPads don't have keyboards. Chromebooks are cheaper and have a keyboard so you can do ACTUAL WORK.
-Apple constantly has trouble getting us on-site repairs
Apple makes shiny single-user devices and I'm glad they missed the boat on education. I only hope I can get people to stop buying the products because "We can't use photoshop on a PC!", just get a bigger monitor and you'll save hundreds!
Rant over. That felt great.
Managing them, at least in my school system, was a nightmare. It cost money any way we looked at it, money we didn't have. If they had just built active directory hooks, or given us a way to manage them for free, or less than inflated 3rd party mdm pricing, we might have supported them, we decided not to, but the schools are autonomous. They bought them anyway, then cried when we said we wouldn't touch them. They tried self management, paid for MDM, etc. and no one knew how to work any of it... It was funny.
"Science is the power of man"
Let's be real, most workplaces use Windows/Linux. So kids are better off.
This is not true for scientific research, particularly in the mathematical-based sciences, where Linux/Unix is the de facto standard (although I am sure some do use Windows). However of the past couple of years I have noticed that the number of mac laptops used by students in my lectures has declined enormously to be replaced by a large variety of windows machines.
As I see it the reasons are twofold: price and ability to write on the screen. Students cannot afford the insanely inflated prices for new hardware which is now far from the leading edge. Plus the ability to write on the screen in tablet mode makes it very easy to email mathematical working and diagrams to professors which is really useful for subjects like physics.
Furthermore with the addition of the Linux subsystem for Windows these machines can now run Linux executables without rebooting. The increasing innovation and price/performance advantage of Windows machines has been enough to get me to convert from mac and while I would love to be able to run MacOS on my Dell laptop, I am happier saving $1000 (Canadian) for a better spec of machine and a less desirable but still workable (and improving) OS.
They have long focused on iOS products to the detriment of OS X because that is what happens when you have a typical MBA who chases raw revenues and a designer calling the shots. Numbers and shiny. Jobs never neglected the Mac in a serious way because iOS needs a moat on the PC side. The Surface Studio should have been a ground-shaking, holy fucking shit moment at Apple, but I'd bet $100 it was laughed at rather than taken as the deadly serious portent of things to come for how Microsoft is coming after Apple by leapfrogging them.
If I had a kid going into STEM, I'd buy them an Asus or Alienware laptop with a Linux on it and a Windows VM. If they were undecided, I'd buy them the Chromebook until they declare a major. At no point would I look at Apple's lineup and say "a $1k-$2.5k soldered together toy with an oft neglected Unix OS is the right starting laptop."
I worked with a school's IT as a consultant. The biggest issue is price for one (comparing Chromebooks and iPads) but another big issue is control. Apple for years never bothered with an MDM solution and schools needed to use expensive thriparty solutions. They've just this past year finally put out their own solution but its probably too late. Google with Chromebooks and G Suite/MDM are just a better solution. Google went after that market aggressively and it paid off.
This is kind of a moot point on the "Google" end of things, considering they just announced they are GIVING UP on the Chromebook-business. And I don't think they have a viable Tablet now...
So, I assume that the Headline is a FUCKING JOKE, like the rest of TFS.
Let's see what those percentages will be like once the Chromebooks fall over, or the OS or Apps stop working because Google has abandoned them, too...
I worked for Apple from 1995 until 2001 in the K12 division. They abandoned education gradually as soon as the focus became consumer goods like ipods.
Also, they ignored competitive advantages they had by not leveraging the Apple Share IP servers which could serve windows clients as well. They made the tech- and never pushed it. At the time it was apparent to me they were pulling out. It was also apparent with the Darwin kernel and the tools taken from NeXT that they had an ready to go enterprise solution in Server 10.
15 years later.... it's apparent they have pulled out of computers in general. It's sad too. When I pull out my alpha disks of OSX it's apparent that a revolution was lost. I can still load the alpha/pre-alpha OSX on present day Intel hardware. Go figure.
It's debatable as to whether they made the right decision or not- could they make a bundle in the enterprise? But to the engineers that worked there at the time paradise was indeed lost.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."