New low-cost MacBook rumored to take on Chromebooks in education
A new report claims that Apple aims to regain its education foothold by releasing a Chromebook killer, a laptop less costly than the MacBook Air.
Currently Apple's lowest-cost laptops are the MacBook Air models
Apple has previously dismissed the Chromebook and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has said it spies on students, but its low-cost means the Chromebook has beaten Apple in education.
Now according to Digitimes, Apple is taking the Chromebook more seriously and is planning a competitor.
While the information is said to come from industry sources, there are few details other than that this Chromebook rival would be a lower-cost MacBook. It will be priced below the MacBook Air, which is Apple's lowest-cost laptop Mac, and in some way made from cheaper components.
Digitimessays that it expects Apple will market this new laptop in such a way that it is differentiated from the rest of the range. So it's likely, for instance, that Apple would sell MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro ranges.
Digitimes concludes that this further means that with Apple's typical lead times for introducing new products, the earliest the Chromebook rival can be released is in the second half of 2024.
For years, Apple has used the MacBook Air and iPad lines for education in the Chromebook segment. It's not clear if or why Apple's plan changed.
It's not clear how much of the Digitimes report is information gathered from these sources, and how much is extrapolation. Digitimes has an excellent record for the information gathered from its industry sources, but a far, far poorer one for what conclusions it draws concerning Apple's plans.
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Comments
the MBA is the dominant laptop.
The main thing to make Apple's device comparable to a Chromebook would be to run iOS. I'd see it being much closer to an Apple eMate than a MacBook.
Apple can definitely do something good but, I think they already do for the most part. Just competing on price would be a money losing deal. For Apple for the schools and for the students.
Up to this point if a school district or a school hasn’t bought MacBooks, MacBook Airs, iPads, etc… they probably never will.
First and foremost, Apple simply doesn't pursue the bottom end of the market. It isn't profitable, unless you use low-quality components, scrape and sell your customers' data, or both. Choosing to do either thing would undermine the core principles of Apple's trillion-dollar. business. Apple just doesn't cater to the high-volume, low-margin market.
Second, MacOS has to run reliably on the lowest-end MacBook and the highest-end Mac Pro. There are limits to writing an OS that makes good use of a $7,000+ powerhouse machine and is also spare enough to run a much, much less powerful notebook. This is why there is always a trailing-edge cutoff for supporting old models, and also why there is still no MacBook SurfacePad hybrid thing.
Perhaps they'll market a version of the iPad to the education crowd, but even with that, the cheapest iPad currently available is a hundred bucks more than a chromebook, and that's before you add a keyboard to it.
I really hope they do this. The quality of the primary education Chromebooks and Windows machines is horrible. They literally fall apart.
Surely Apple have been doing enough materials research that could make something cheap because it is streamlined.
Why couldn't they make a single-board computer where the upward facing part of the board is a big touch panel that gets covered in a soft fabric that could be screen printed with a key layout. Downfacing all the computer parts and connections.
1. Use their own existing lower-cost components, and things like the older generation chips.
2. Substitute cheaper components (e.g. a plastic body) for expensive ones.
it is extremely unlikely Apple does this in my opinion. The iPad is already quite dominant in education. Apple doesn’t need a new notebook to go after the crappy Chromebook. Why compare MacBook sales with chromebooks? The iPad serves the same purpose and almost always has a keyboard case in education.
They are not going to be able to underprice Chromebooks, as I think most of them are at single digit margins, if not negative, and trying to make money on either support contracts or software contracts, or both. Not to mention the whole thing about computers for every kid in elementary and intermediate school is over-rated, both in terms of quality of education and brand loyalty.
I don't think any of the incumbents, Google, OEMs, support entities, are happy with this market either. They don't make any profit. The notion that they are getting brand loyalty from this isn't panning out. Don't think any significant fraction of kids are going to look back and think fondly of this hardware. Most of them probably are thinking how crappy Chromebooks are.
And like everyone is saying, the Chromebook market is antithetical to how Apple likes to run its business. They want to make profit on the hardware sale, and they putatively want to produce hardware they are proud of which typically always mean it will be more expensive. Given that, here's a back of the envelope.
The Apple TV 4K 128 GB is $150. This has an A15, 4 GB RAM, 128 GB NAND, HDMI and Ethernet. I think Apple is selling this device pretty darn close to single digit margins. Double the RAM and put it into a kid-friendly laptop form factor: water resistant, drop/impact resistant, robust to improper handling. Same 220 PPI 13.3" LCD in the M1 MBA, which is now 5 years old. Like an iPhone, you should be able to throw it into a swimming pool, rinse it off, dry it and it will continue working. Kids will sit on it. They will toss it around.
Sold only in education for $500? Apple would make $100 per sale?
Yes, the question still remains on how a $300 to $400 Apple laptop makes money, makes a difference. Lastly, the gate that Apple has to cross isn't necessarily a hardware one. The gate to get into schools is probably really MS Office cloud service or something like that. Even worse, the future may be literal "Office Cloud" where the client computer is just displaying the UI of apps being run on a cloud service, if not just through the web browser. This just further pushes down the cost of client hardware.
I don't see Apple taking this approach. If you want a cheap, dependable computer (albeit without a built-in screen and pointing device) then maybe try the Pi400: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-400/
Repeating the point I made up-thread, MacOS has to be designed to be robust enough for a $7K+ MacPro and streamlined enough not to choke the oldest supported version of the lowest-end Mac notebook computer. The Eric-the-Half-a-Mac you've hacked out of an AppleTV above would become that lowest-end Mac notebook expected to run MacOS. Now make that thing five, six, or seven years old, and still expect it to run the same operating system driving a brand new Pro workstation at Pixar or wherever. That's not practical. It's also a recipe for millions of kids bringing home a cheap, slow, hobbled piece of junk with an Apple logo on it that becomes the symbol that angry parents hold up at school board meetings across the country, demanding to know how their kids are supposed to learn anything using it, and why did this corporate giant gobble up their tax money for junk?
Right now Chromebooks hastily bought during the pandemic are in the news, because many are hitting a hard-stop "death date," meaning not just that they won't get more OS updates or that they won't be eligible for support, but that they will no longer function. At all. By design. Even though they were dirt cheap to start with, this news is not showering Google in an aura of glory. A dirt-cheap education MacBook would suffer the same ignominy. It would either choke on its own software and decaying batteries, or it would have a firm deprecation timeline of no more than two or three years, and either option would only undermine Apple's reputation.
There is no scenario where someone at an executive meeting at Apple is going to stand up and suggest that this would be a good idea for them to pursue.