Schools Wont Be Buying the MacBook Neo In Droves
A lot of the discourse around the MacBook Neo has been that Schools will be lapping it up. Well I'm here to piss on your parade. While I may be a weird internet blogger by night by day I am a sysadmin in Education and have been for a decade now. I have worked through this transition from every school being an active directory domain with ageing dell desktop towers to being a place where Chromebooks rule the roost. Teachers have gone from whiteboards with markers to interactive display screens with up to 50 point multi touch (yes that's 5 pairs of hands they can track at a time).
Here is somethings I have learned, Schools want Cheap, because they have no money, they also want reliable because they have no money, and they want cheap because they have no money.
What delivers that the most is Chromebooks, as much as I loathe these things personally I have to admit google has been incredibly smart in listening to what schools want and delivering that. Chromebooks are cheap, they have robust management tailored for education and they are cheap.
When you're managing a fleet of Windows devices if one goes wrong and you need to reinstall windows, something that is quite common when you have children using these machines, you need to PXE boot the laptop run the imaging software image the machine and then do any final setup even in the most efficient of environments this is at least a 25 minute process but more likely its a 45-90 minute process in a school due to the aging hardware both on the server and the laptop side.
With a Chromebook you simply Ctrl + Alt + Shift + R wait about 60 seconds type in the enrollment email and the Wi-Fi password and you're away. This is something you can do in the field or rather in the classroom without having to whisk it away to the office to the frustration of teachers and students.
So onto the neo, in order for schools to adopt these properly it means totally abandoning their google or Microsoft environments, something schools would be unlikely to do, or go for a hybrid approach, but then comes the difficulty of implementing SSO onto a Mac from a Microsoft or Google login a process so Janky and prone to just not working every school where we have tried to implement this has ultimatly ended up selling off their macs and buying more chromebooks or windows PCs instead to take their place.
But most importantly is the price. Yes £599 retail and £499 education pricing is low, for apple, but the retail price on Chromebooks is around $200-$250 depending on the model, education pricing on these is even less, you maths fans out there have figured out that means you can buy 3 Chromebooks for the price of 1 Neo even at education pricing.
Almost every school would rip your hand off for the deal of 3 devices at the price of 1 of a different device regardless of any of the tradeoffs of doing such a thing. Apples education play in my book is still the iPad, its priced to compete with the Chromebooks and has similar ease of management and no logins needed.
Now I'm sure there will be some schools somewhere that buy these but as far as education goes These will see more use on University Campus' rather than secondary schools classrooms.
Last Edited: 4 weeks, 2 days ago.