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Apple Loses More Ground To Chromebooks In The Classroom

By 11 Comments

by Gabriel Brangers
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As Chromebooks continue to carve a place in the consumer market, their firm foothold in the education sector just keeps getting stronger. In 2013 Apple MacBooks and iPads represented nearly half the mobile computing devices purchased by the US K-12 segment.

Fast forward three years and the landscape has changed extensively. With 40 years of providing devices for educational institutions, Apple’s entrenchment in schools has taken a serious hit.




New Kids on the Block

In 2015 Chromebooks achieved a monumental win by capturing a whopping 50% of the mobile device market in the classroom. Last year Chrome OS saw another formidable increase to 58% while Apple’s share of the pie dwindled to a mere 19%. The most phenomenal part of this accomplishment is fact that Chrome OS just landed on the scene, for all intents and purposes, in 2011.

In just 5 short years Chromebooks have moved far beyond just an impactful presence in the classroom to an all out dominance. Aside from the relatively low cost of Chromebooks, Google’s array of Classroom products, ease of deployment and versatile cloud-based platform have change the way schools are looking at computing. Now, with the addition of Google Play, Chromebooks stand to absorb Android’s waning share of sales as well. As of last year, the mobile OS giant slipped to 1% of the US education market.




Apple has attempted to counter the slump in sales with the introduction of the new “Classroom” app but without a push for more affordable devices it could be too little, too late. Windows, who holds 22% of the market, has made moves as of late to reduce cost on devices and shift to a more cloud-based ecosystem. However, the lack of a concise roadmap for Windows in the classroom will likely mean an uphill battle to gain ground against Chromebooks.

Microsoft has made huge strides in developing its education ecosystem offering in the past year, with major announcements on both the devices and platform side. To date however, these developments have not stopped Google’s momentum within the US K-12 market. Microsoft continues to face challenges to win back end-user mindshare.

Mike Fisher, Associate Director of Education at Futuresource Consulting.

The bigger picture

The growing number of Chrome devices in education will undoubtedly have long term effects on the retail market of Chromebooks. In the grand scheme you have a generation of students being brought up using Google’s OS and the hardware that houses it. As with other technologies, their learning habits and skills will be molded around these devices creating a future workforce that are accustomed to Chrome OS. Like iOS before them, Chromebooks will be the device of choice for many of these students if for no other reason than it’s what they’re comfortable using.

The ripple effect of Chromebooks in the classroom will radiate out as students go off to college and parents send them off with a new Chromebook. As Google continues to expand their enterprise services and the consumer market for devices like that Samsung Chromebook Plus continues to grow, the next generation will be one that looks to Chrome OS as a default not an exception.

Chromebook Classroom Products (AMAZON)

Source: Future Consulting

  • Its no wonder. I just finished spending close to an hour going through a round robin to get my wife’s Apple devices keychain restored so she can login after applying an ios update wiped the keychain access. Any the funny thing is, I couldn’t get anything to work, iPhone, 2 iPads and Macbook Pro, but used my Chromebook to log into her iCloud account and was able to send the codes from the web. Total nuts, I never see updates on my Chrome devices except when it alerts me to restart, and that restart is quick and easy. Can you imagine the chaos in a school with hundreds of ios devices? Apple’s slogan for years has been “it just works”. Well, that doesn’t fit so well anymore and I think more aptly describes chromeos. My thoughts, J

    • Jason

      John, just read your troubles with attempting Apple’s keychain restoration. A frustrating task I’ve encountered too many times myself. For a company whose motto spins around “It Just works” I see that hubris may be Apple’s undoing as it is their ‘productivity’ software I first noticed as it still lingers in the children’s playground still waiting to grow up to be professional tools.

      Google, by contrast, is brilliantly seizing the vacuum left by Apple’s reticence to fix their software. Professional tools are needed by younger and younger users and Google is making that happen.

      There is a difference between what looks slick and cool and what actually is.

      • Agree with you Jason. If my family wasn’t so embedded in the Apple eco system, I would have them all on Chrome devices by now. It is time consuming to make the switch, music, pictures, documents, etc. but so worth it in the long run. J

  • DumbledorBoB

    ‘Back in the day’, Pascal, a procedural programming language, was replacing BASIC as the introductory programming language in colleges. Those graduates expected to use Pascal to program their software projects at their jobs. Some did, but you don’t hear or read about Pascal much, anymore.

    Another trend ‘back then’ was new college grads expected to have a laptop at their desk at a time when shared desktop computers was the norm–well, at least at the aerospace company I worked at. That trend has held and expanded to include tablets and cell phones. (and that’s today’s history lesson)

    • CajunMoses

      And just to add to the history lesson: Pascal used cryptic symbols, and despite its touted comparative ease of coding, it consumed way, way, more CPU time than simple FORTRAN used to do the same tasks. The moral of that story is, enormous power has very limited usefulness unless it’s also safe, simple, and efficient. And that moral describes Chrome browser and Chrome OS to a tee.

      • Very well said! J

      • Michael Graff

        Are you thinking of APL? I remember terminals with APL keyboards full of special symbols.

        The Pascal I used in college used normal alpha, numbers, and punctuation.

  • As a highschool student at a school that uses chromebooks, I can say that the chromebooks have taken over, in what feels like a very short time. They were implemented last year and they work very well for school. Before we had chromebooks, we had large and bulky laptops that were at least 2x to price of chromebooks and broke down much easier. The only apple products that we have in our school are in one classroom, and the school wasn’t happy buying all of the macs. The chromebooks were like a gift from god when they became available, and with google classroom, the appeal was very high. Im graduating this year, but i’m very sure that the school will stick with the chromebooks.

  • Karen S

    I can tell you I spend as much time maintaining our school’s 10 iPads as I do maintaining our 100 chromebooks. It’s a no brainer. The kids love how much easier Chromebooks are to use.

  • jeremy

    thats not true

    • Jeremy – help those of us following these comments understand what you mean by “thats not true”. Can you provide some details? We are interested to hear them. Thx