Apple battles to regain top place in schools
APPLE’S latest product announcement wasn’t from its new campus in Cupertino, California. It was a high school on the north side of Chicago - a signal that Apple isn’t ready to let go of the education market it once dominated.
It launched SchoolWork, a new app for teachers to hand out assignments and monitor the progress of students. Apple also launched a refreshed version of its 9.7-inch iPad, which starts at US$299 (RM1,166) for schools. For the consumer market, it costs US$329 (RM1,283). The updated iPad supports Apple Pencil (RM386) for sketching and handwritten notes.
“Creativity sparks a deeper level of engagement in students, and we’re excited to help teachers bring out that creativity in the classroom,” said Philip Schiller, senior Apple vice president for marketing.
Macs, and later iPads, were once synonymous with classroom tech. But over the past several years, Google and Microsoft have overtaken the company as leaders in new classroom tech. Google is now the undisputed king in classrooms, thanks to an aggressive push to give individual students low-cost laptops - deals it sweetened with free software, and cheap rates to help districts manage the thousands of new machines.
Google’s lead will be hard to shake, given how well it has sold its systems to schools and how accustomed they’ve become to its products, said Mike Fisher, associate director at Futuresource Consulting. School districts also tend to use a mix of products, often starting out younger students
Creativity sparks a deeper level of engagement in students, and we’re excited to help teachers bring out that creativity in the classroom. – Philip Schiller, senior Apple vice president for marketing
with iPads but then moving to Chromebooks or cheaper Windows laptops as students age and require more computing power or a full keyboard. Apple has never pulled away from education, but it hasn’t been as aggressive, analysts said; for example, the last educationfocused event it held was in 2012 when it introduced iBooks.
A low-cost laptop, which has also been rumoured, would be a tough sell for Apple - even if it slashed the price of a laptop significantly. Right now, Chromebooks and Windows PC’s aimed at schools cost about US$300 (RM1,170) per student, Fisher said. That’s about the same education pricing for an iPad. Apple makes what money it does from selling hardware and software as a package, unlike Google, which makes a small amount licensing the Chromebooks and also a subscription fee from management software. Microsoft deeply discounts devices - tablets start as low as US$189 (RM737) and sells software to schools.
Education is an important market for tech firms, even though companies don’t make a significant amount of money from school contracts if you look at how much Apple makes from its iPhone sales and Google makes from advertising, said analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights. With discounted devices and low-cost or even free software, even large contracts aren’t comparative moneymakers. The appeal comes in establishing preferences.
Getting young people to like a brand is even more significant in a connected world, where it’s easier to use particular programs across platforms. A preference for Microsoft Word, for example, is no longer limited by a device. The same is true for Google’s suite of apps.
Increasingly, as in the consumer world, tech companies are pitching schools a whole ecosystem of software, hardware and even lesson plans. Apple announced in January, for example, that it will expand its own Swift coding curriculum for iOS to serve every student in the Chicago public schools.—