You know, one of these days we're going to have some actual good news to report about Apple's education market share, at which time we'll probably keel over with massive coronaries all 'round and we'll wind up dead at the tender age of eleventy-something because the hover-ambulance will have been delayed due to a skyway blocked by teeming flocks of flying pigs. Until then, though, it's business as usual for our heroes in Cupertino, i.e. yet another market share drop in the hallowed halls of academia. MacNN pointed us in the direction of a SunSpot.net article which reveals that Apple's slice of the K-12 schoolin' pie (based on the number of schools polled who plan to purchase Macs next year) comes out to 21%, according to Quality Education Data-- which is great next to Apple's overall share of computer sales, but downright sucky compared to the 41% in education it held back in '96.

Hang on a sec-- we already covered this, didn't we? About two weeks back? Holy Hannah, it's finally happened: we're officially so jaded about constantly hearing declining market share numbers for Apple in education, we barely even notice when we're seeing the same data regurgitated by two different sources. So the good news is that this is the exact same bad news we saw a couple of weeks ago. Woo-hoo!! Break out the bubbly!

Or, indeed, if you're not the type to celebrate the fact that nobody's shown Apple to have declined still further in the past fortnight, you could always try holding out until the company gives us something real to cheer about, education-wise-- but we wouldn't necessarily recommend it. After all, for years now we've been continuously force-fed that line about how Apple's working like gangbusters to reclaim its education throne, and frankly the results have been, shall we say, somewhat less than spectacular. Despite victories like Henrico County and educationy moves like the purchase of PowerSchool, things most certainly do not seem lots better than they were a few years ago.

Now, the manifold issues determining Apple's success or failure in the education market are complex and diverse-- which is why we've decided that from now on we're going to give our heads a break and reduce all those factors to the single overriding factor of price. As gross oversimplifications go, you have to admit that it's not without its special charm: Apple is getting spanked by Dell because schools are buying whatever big-name systems are cheapest, and those aren't Macs. Easy, right?

Keeping that premise squarely in mind, then, we urge you to check out an article over at Low End Mac, which was brought to our attention by faithful viewer Paul Lee. In it, science teacher Jeff Adkins makes a compelling argument that Apple could start reversing its market share loss by selling an education-targeted lab computer-- a real education-targeted lab computer, not the eMac. Picture a revamped Cube, back from the deep freeze and packing a G3 processor, a healthy base amount of RAM, a VGA port, and a $300 sticker price. Yes, $300. Now that might start tacking the points onto Apple's share percentage.

What, you don't think it could be done? On the contrary, we wouldn't be surprised if Apple could actually break even on such a system, since the up-front cost of design is already paid for, and component-wise we're basically talking about a $999 iBook sans the pricey LCD panel. Besides, given the importance of the education market, we figure that even if Apple would take a loss on each unit sold, getting that market share number growing again is so crucial, that'd be a price well-paid. Then again, we've long felt that if Apple were actually serious about getting back into the schools, it would've pulled a billion dollars out of its Big Pile O' Cash™ and earmarked it for use solely to cover obscene discounts for education purchasing, but hey, that's just us...