According to the latest data from IDC, Google, for the first time ever, has overtaken Apple in United States schools. The research firm claims that Google shipped 715,000 Chromebooks to schools in the third quarter, while Apple shipped 702,000 iPads to schools. Chromebooks as a whole now account for a quarter of the educational market (via FT).
IDC says that the lower-cost of Chromebooks when compared to iPads is a huge factor for school districts. Chromebooks start at $199, while last year’s iPad Air, with educational discounts applied, costs $379. The research firm also says that many school corporations prefer the full keyboard found on Chromebooks instead of the touchscreen found on iPads. Some schools that use iPads, however, supply students with a keyboard case as well, but that only further increases the cost of iPads compared to Chromebooks. IT departments also tend to favor Chromebooks because they are simpler to manage when compared to iPads.
The US education market is important to Apple, so it’s remarkable to see Chromebooks do so well there. In the meantime, here in The Netherlands, I’ve still yet to see one in the wild.
My Wife is a teacher and she said that the reason for the difference is almost exclusively due to Microsoft’s delay in releasing Office for the iPad. Apparently schools were almost universally waiting to make the purchase until office was available. Office 365 is free for students.
But Microsoft Office is not available on Chromebooks either (except the browser based Office Online, which was always available on both devices)?
Anyway, as the Office app for iPad has been available since March 2014 for Office 365 customers and since September for everyone, next quarter’s numbers should show some movement if your wife is correct.
The assumption is that they are equal products without one having unique advantages and these established preferences. The disparity in numbers was the result of waiting to buy the preferred product that ALSO has the preferred software.
Office is as free as long as you are student? It stays awkward way of using. Why not use something which is really free, at any time and place.
Schools shouldn’t be tempted to buy such vendor lock.
Typical Google math –
From these numbers, Apple made a profit of $86 MM – Google $3.5 MM
(proft of about $5 per chromebook). AND Google has to pay for your cloud access and storage.
So, pretty typical of Google – building marketshare while Apple simply goes after PROFITS marketshare.
Add in Mac sales and it’s pretty typical.
Or a better analogy, Apple is Texas football, Google is the bowling team.
Oh yeah, that is so typical… You know what is more typical? Being oh so typical about the typicallities of the typical fanboyism.
Typical…
I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing as a “profits marketshare”.
“The revised price will be $504, compared to $699 for the iPads with curriculum. With taxes and other fees, the full cost of the more fully equipped chromebooks rises to $768.â€
http://articles.latimes.com/2014/jan/30/local/la-me-lausd-ipads-201…
At $768 apiece you can by 14,875 Ipads for $11.4 million. If the Chromebooks are $100 cheaper, you can purchase 4,000 of these for $2.7 million. Total cost, $14.1 million.
Edited 2014-12-02 01:33 UTC
It’s rather misleading of you not to add “taxes and other fees” to the iPad price.
Another difference is not much lives (except transiently) on a Chromebook. We might be able to swap chromebooks without noticing a difference. iPads have things locally which need syncing.
Google has the cloud, Apple still has iTunes. If you don’t want or need iTunes, can you do anything with an iOS device, or is it a brick?
Apple has a cloud and hasn’t needed iTunes to utilize their mobile devices for years.
You can use any cloud service with an iPad. For instance we use iOS where I work but use Google Apps for work. Google Mail, Google drive etc.
Only thing we use iTunes for is to restore iPads and iPhones and to update them.
Of course you can
I have an iPad and have never synched it with iTunes. Many apps (esp video apps, ebook apps, etc) have a built-in ftp/web server to transfer files wirelessly, just as you can on Android. If I want to get photos off, I just connect it to PC and copy from Explorer. Plus, as another poster said, there’s all kinds of cloud services available.
Google will always beat Apple on price. The scary part here is that to use an iPad you don’t need Apples services but to use Chrome books you do, which means now at a young age your kids are tracked by Google and they compile huge databases on them that can be sold as soon as they turn 18.
That’s a bit scary to me. Don’t want my kids tracked and compiled.
Sometimes but not in this case. As I mentioned a few posts up, the iPad solution is less expensive.
The article you cite says that the school district has a 200$ discount for the iPad (500$ instead of 700$ with the taxes and extras). Chromebooks are never mentioned. I don’t know the bulk price, but they can be purchased for 200-250$ apiece, which is tremendously cheaper than the cheapest iPad.
Here in Australia we supply both to schools as well as Macbooks. The Chromebooks are starting to take off but some schools are interested in preserving their existing investment in Apple. In highschool it becomes a bit heavier weighted towards the Apple products due to the music/video capabilities.
Here in France we don’t supply schools with tablet nor laptop. It’s actually illegal in France to do advertising in schools.
[rolls eyes] So if a school in France buys a textbook, the publisher’s name is removed from the cover? How about the brand names on the pencils that serve no purpose other than advertising?
Actually the text of the law uses the world “ostentatious”. It’s ok to put brand names on pencils so long as it’s not ostentatious: it’s not big and you don’t wave it. Schools can not receive donations if that is ostentatiously for advetizing for example. Ostentatious religious or political display is also forbidden. I know this may seem hard to grasp for foreigners. The ban of the burqa in french schools for instance was about applying this already existing law, just by saying that the burqa was an ostentatious religious symbol. Few foreigners understood it.
Anyway I fail to see what other purpose a tablet can serve aside from advertizing. Students have computers in school. They can use them to make presentations, write stuff, search the internet and stuff. What is the purpose of a tablet? (Honest question)
Money spent looks like someone somewhere is doing something, without anything actually being done. That’s my hypothesis.
Personally, with the amount of pay that teachers get, that extra $500 to $700 per student would be appreciated by the teachers more.
We’re talking about educational, high volume prices… right?
Also, there’s specific software that educators need that Apple includes at no extra cost.
Yes but in America companies, Government etc never look at over all price, they almost always look at price in a vacuum. So Google services would be a cost and since you are not required to use Chromebooks to use Google services etc then getting Chromebooks would be looked at as its on price and that price is going to be cheaper then iPads.
Your kids are going to be tracked one way or the other – either by Google, or someone else. I’m not saying it’s any better/worse than someone else doing it, but the tracking is inevitable. People in the majority have stated loud and clearly that they’d rather pay for content and services with their privacy, than with actual $$.
Then don’t let them online, at all. Because if you have *any* online presence, you’re going to be tracked by someone… Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. Choosing your device simply gives you a choice of who does the tracking.
Right and I would have that option at home, but now if I send my kids to pubic school I have no choice. So I have to take them out of school also??
And I can use an iPad without being tracked by Apple as you don’t have to use Apple services to use an iPad.
So you don’t have an Apple ID and don’t use the App Store? I find that difficult to believe. And what do you think iAd is? I assume as well that you never use Siri, which is Bing powered?
Edited 2014-12-03 20:26 UTC
He didn’t say he did, he said he could
No, you can’t unless you find the device functional enough without any apps at all, or want to jailbreak it. Neither case applies for devices students will be using. They will need apps and they will not be permitted to jailbreak. Hense, they will be tracked.
The big difference are the keyboards. Typing sucks on a tablet, plain and simple. You want kids to do mor ethan play games or surf the web and you need a keyboard. There is also the issue that these laptops are more like pcs than ipads. Ipads are just not meant for academic use.
Any evidence that iPads or Chromebooks improve education in first world countries?
Not in France at least…
It’s evident in the elevated level of discourse all over the Internet. /s
1. The administration costs of a chromebook are close to zero. A user open it, authenticates with his corporate account, and that’s it. As somebody points before, no need to synchronize or adaptation to the user.
2. Chromebooks are cheaper. the economy of scale works on both directions
3. Clamshell form factor protects the screen. Cheapo plastic is lighter and more resistant than aluminium, and there are chromebooks specially intended for children’s small and clumsy hands
4. Costs of cloud services is cheaper by far than cost of local apps
5. Complete browser. There are no restrictions for use moodle, for instance
6. As Techgeek points out, physical keyboard is intended for serious writing
7. Finally, outside of America, Apple marketshare is not very important and it’s decreasing. Apple is a premium brand and a stable world economical crisis is not the best situation for adquiring huge number of ipads.
Remember, we are not comparing ipad with chromebooks in abstract. We are comparing it as School appliances
Well, normally I am lurking. but with the education tag on osnews I can’t resist.
My school bought 32 Chromebooks. It’s a test. And we didn’t want Ipads. Chromebooks are for working. You can type, share, it has a decent browser, students can’t install their favorite software which, for this moment, is a plus.
And we make programs:
http://jongleren.wordpress.com/2014/11/28/programmeren-met-scratch/ (dutch)
One thing. I don’t like the Google lock, just like I don’t like an Apple lock, or whatevercompany lock. I would prefer something open and stored on a private server. Until then, it works.
Actually the discussion in hardware and software shouldn’t be what hardware is used, but who’s choice it is. Now it’s the school or government who decides what is good for you. I would prefer that students make their own choices. The software and hardware of schools should be agnostic of the hardware which is connected.
My 0.02 cent
Well stated. Lurk less, write more. 🙂
my 2nd grade daughter ws talking about her technology class and some things she said got me suspicious. Interestingly enough she was able to easily log into one of our chromebooks and she started showing me a couple of docs they had been working on. So she gets to use her school account on our home chromebooks (we have 2 of them).
The summer before last my oldest daughter had a paper to do in the summer. At that time I gave her a memory stick to walk around with. This last summer we had our first chromebook and she did her work there. i opened sharing on her docs and used another machine to suggest edits to her papers through google docs. Nice step forward.
Edited 2014-12-05 04:44 UTC
You would be a parent I would love to see at my school.
You actually are interested in their works. Great!!
Article here from August 5, from the Atlantic:
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/08/whats-the-best…
Interesting article. Particularly agree with some of the teachers regarding the necessity of keyboards. I might add that it’s not just the ability to use a keyboard, but the presence of common keyboard shortcuts. Almost everyone in my school used cmd+b for bold, even those who didn’t know what a keyboard shortcut was knew common ones like that. Even the teachers did. iPads, even with keyboard cases, lack many of these. Funny that the ones iPads do have, like select all and cut/copy/paste, were by far the less used ones. Chromebooks, and most of the online office suites such as Office 365 and Google Docs, have all of these. Plus, selecting text is far more efficient with a trackpad especially for fine detail. Let’s also not forget that an iPad can only have one window open at a time. One. These are students who very often need more than that for simple research. At the minimum they’ll have a browser and a notetaking window active. Some tablets, such as Samsung’s and Windows-powered ones, can do this, but not iPads at least not yet.
Another bonus for Chromebooks: they are hackable, if you want them to be. Generally the hardware is open, you can install a GNU/Linux distribution of your choice. Or just run crouton, which install a separate environment within ChromeOS, which means you can run any GNU/Linux software that you want.
@Thom “…here in The Netherlands, I’ve still yet to see [a Chromebook} in the wild.”
I live in the Netherlands too, I work at a university and I do see Chromebooks. Some of our students buy them, a few of the staff as well. Also, two of my friends have Chromebooks.