EEUU: Apple’s Plans To Win Back The U.S. Education Market May Be Too Little Too Late

NoticiasAmérica del Norte, Estados Unidos, Noticia

Por: forbes.com/Susan Adams/28-03-2018

At an hour-long event staged in a Chicago public high school auditorium this morning, Apple said it would introduce lower-priced devices and initiatives aimed at regaining market share at America’s schools.

The company will offer a new 9.7-inch iPad that will be compatible with its Pencil drawing stylus, which previously only worked on the higher-priced iPad Pro. Last year Apple dropped the price it charges schools for the low-priced tablet to $299, a reduction of $30 from the consumer price. Today Apple also announced that Logitech, a Swiss company that makes computer accessories, will introduce a $49 drawing stylus that can substitute for Apple’s $99 Pencil.

Since 2012, Apple has lost its grip on the educational hardware market for students in kindergarten through 12th grade. According to a report by U.K.-based Futuresource Consulting, which sells its market research studies to Apple and other tech firms, in 2012 Apple sold 52% of all mobile computing products to K-12 schools in the U.S. But last year Apple had only 15% of that market. Chromebooks made by Samsung, Acer, and other manufacturers are now the dominant players, with 58% of the market last year. Windows machines trailed in second place at 22%.

Courtesy: Futuresource

Apple’s share of the education hardware market has shrunk since 2012.

Future source doesn’t break out the value of the K-12 education hardware market but its research shows that school spending on all information technology products, including hardware, software, information technology services and assessments totaled $18 billion in 2017.

Why has Apple’s popularity taken such a hit? Four reasons: Its devices have cost more than twice as much as competitors’, its batteries didn’t last as long, iPads lack the keyboards viewed by teachers as essential to writing instruction, and Apple’s computing environment does not live mainly in the cloud. By contrast, students working on cloud-based Chromebooks can use any machine to get access to their work and administrators can easily implement systemwide changes from a dashboard on a single computer. And Chromebooks sell for as little as $149.

At the Chicago event today, Apple announced several new education apps. It is introducing a tool called Schoolwork, which will make it possible for teachers to give digital handouts to students, including notes, PDFs, and web links. One of Schoolwork’s selling points is privacy. Only teachers will be able to see students’ data. But Google also promises privacy for student information and it’s not clear whether Apple’s system is more secure. Schoolwork will launch in June. Apple is also updating its Pages word processing app, which will allow teachers and students to make books together using handwritten notes, photos, videos and drawings using pre-made templates.

*Fuente: https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2018/03/27/apples-plans-to-win-back-the-u-s-education-market-may-be-too-little-too-late/

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