Back in 2010 Apple introduced its first iPad. It’s been four years since then and today iPad has a huge chuck of the tablet market and is owned by millions of people all around the world. A few years back schools in U.S. started experimenting with iPads, trying to implement them into the classes and make students use them on a regular basis. iPads have been adopted my many schools throughout the country, but they have some competition now by the likes of Google’s Chromebook devices.
Educational system is a rather serious market for technology companies such as Apple and Google. Joseph Morris, director of market intelligence at the Center for Digital Education, said that on average schools spend about a third of their technology budgets on computer hardware. This is not only a great way to promote their hardware, but a way to promote their software as well. Talking about software, it seems Chromebooks are gaining some ground on Apple’s iPad when it comes to usage in some schools. Some of the mentioned schools are selling their iPads in order to buy Chromebooks while others gave up on iPad and are now using Chromebooks instead. There are reasons to this of course, in some cases teachers simply prefer one over the other and in others schools are trying to keep their expenses down, Chromebooks are a better choice if we consider the price of course. Some teachers said that they prefer Chromebooks because they makes students more productive and it’s easier for everyone to do the work properly due to the power of Google’s Cloud offerings. Not only that, but some of them even said that students see iPads as gaming devices.
L.A. district recalled 2,100 iPads from students. Schools were told they are going to be able to choose between 6 different devices, Chromebooks and hybrids between laptops and tablets. Guilford County Schools (North Carolina) cancelled their tablet program while Fort Bend (Texas) cancelled its iPad initiative. Hillsborough on the other hands decided to take a somewhat different approach. They distributed 200 iPads and around 200 Chromebooks to their students. After doing some tests, or studies if you will, with both devices they decided to sell their iPads and will distribute 4,600 Chromebooks by the fall of 2014. David Mahaley, who is a head administrator and active classroom teacher at Franklin Academy in Wake Forest, on the other hand had a somewhat different opinion. He stated the following: “I don’t own Apple stock or anything like that; I see the iPad as a great tool that we’ve been able to exploit.”
You can see more examples if you follow the source link below. Some schools/teachers prefer iPads/other tablets, others Chromebooks or laptop-tablet hybrids. There are many factors to consider when deciding though and price is definitely one of them. Considering Chromebook prices start at $279 while on the other hand they can’t get an iPad for less than $399. It’s going to be interesting to see how will this develop in the coming years and will either of the companeis be able to take some serious advantage here.