Chromebooks are Kicking Apple's Butt

The education market has long been Apple's to dominate, from the early days of its first computers to today's iPads. Challengers have tried to encroach over the years, but the company may have met its match in Google's Chromebook platform.

The cheap laptops running Google's Chrome OS got off to a slow start, with schools ironically being one of the first places the devices were embraced. But 2014 has seen a rapid adoption of the machines, to the extent that Microsoft shifted its strategy and started offering low-cost licenses for Windows 8.1 in order to offer inexpensive Windows laptops to compete against Chromebooks.

According to a report from market research firm IDC and cited in the Financial Times (paywall site), more Chromebooks were shipped to schools in the third quarter than Apple iPads. While the difference in sales was pretty slim (715,000 Chromebooks to 702,000 iPads), it was still a breakthrough performance considering how trendy it's been for school districts to hand out Apple's tablets to students as part of a technological "revolution" in education.

But it's not too hard to figure out why this happened. IDC speculates that the low cost of the Chromebook laptops — often $200 — is half the price of a new full-sized iPad. It also obviously comes with a built-in keyboard, which can make it more productive out of the box for students to use for typing documents, though IDC points out that the iPad's touchscreen has advantages of its own (especially for younger students).

With their cloud-based apps, Chromebooks are fairly easy to deploy and manage, and Google has developed tools for educators (like Classroom) to use to get the most out of the devices, which is why ZDNet's Ken Hess called Chromebooks and education "a perfect match" earlier this year. Intel has started paying close attention to the platform, revealing a reference design for Chromebooks specifically tailored towards education.