As the Apple Turns: Scene 5158: Henrico? Maine? Kid Stuff (1/28/05)

Henrico? Maine? Kid Stuff (1/28/05)

The annual Florida Educational Technology Corporation conference just finished up on Friday, but you wouldn't know it by anything Apple's said-- at least, nothing it's said officially. See, FETC is one of those conferences at which Apple traditionally rolls out quiet little advances in education technology, like new versions of PowerSchool or the Apple Store for Education; in years past, it also used the event as an excuse to issue press releases trumpeting the company's top spot in education market share. But Apple lost those bragging rights to Dell years ago, and apparently it's got nothing new education-wise that's important enough to rate a full-blown press release, so FETC has come and gone with nary a whimper.

But that doesn't mean there wasn't some juicy Apple news on the show floor. According to a blog posting at gilgamesh.ca by someone who attended, one of the Apple reps in the company's booth was surprisingly candid about a pending education laptop deal that Apple is reportedly close to winning. If Booth Guy has his facts straight, then Atlanta's Cobb County wants to stick portables in its students' backpacks and has narrowed the manufacturer field down to just two finalists: Apple and IBM.

That's noteworthy in part because education top dog Dell has apparently dropped out-- presumably because Cobb County doesn't want to pay more than $275 per laptop, and Dell isn't hungry enough to eat that kind of cost. Apple, on the other hand, is probably starving to return to its former education glory, and would love nothing more than to pump another county's schools full to bursting with iBooks, even if that means it might have to forgo a little thing like "profit" in order to do so. Why IBM is still in the mix is beyond us, seeing as the company was so sick of the whole personal computing spiel that it sold its entire PC business to China's Lenovo. Maybe Lenovo's just looking to score some street cred as a newly-international PC manufacturer; who knows? But if Apple is willing to beat low-cost champ Dell on price, we doubt the company's going to roll over for Lenovo. It must want this contract bad.

"But AtAT," you might well ask, "why so much fuss over just one county? How big a deal could that really be?" Pretty darn big, as it turns out, folks; gilgamesh.ca claims that the deal is worth a whopping 60,000 laptops. That's a whole lot more than the 23,000-iBook Henrico County deal that kicked off the whole "massive purchases of AirPort-enabled iBooks for school use" trend back in 2001, and which, at the time, was the "largest portable computer sale to education ever." And it's even more than Apple's original 38,600-iBook contract for the entire state of Maine. Heck, it's almost as big as both of those mammoth deals put together. So yeah, this officially qualifies as a Big Deal™.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a decision might be reached as early as February 9th. We'll keep our fingers crossed for Apple, since an extra 60,000 units in the school system (even at an unconscionably low price) would be a nice big step for Apple towards regaining its education sales crown. And Steve looks really, really good in a tiara.

SceneLink (5158)

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The above scene was taken from the 1/28/05 episode:

January 28, 2005: We may be late all the time, but at least we're not "struggling to keep control of a confusing world" like some people we could mention. Meanwhile, Apple edges Google out of the top spot for "Global Brand of the Year," even as the company prepares to close a 60,000-iBook deal with the education bigwigs of Cobb County in Georgia...

Other scenes from that episode:

5156: Why Lateness Totally ROCKS (1/28/05) Who says there's no up side to being late all the time? Sure, broadcasting last Friday's episode in the wee hours of this fine Monday morning may seem like a serious breach of scheduling protocol, but in reality it's actually just a cunning strategy to bring you far more drama that you'd have otherwise received...
5157: Time To Google "Defeat" (1/28/05) Justice at last! Everyone knows that Apple has long been one of the most influential brands in existence, and back in 2002 the company was rightfully named the "Global Brand of the Year" in an annual survey of thousands of "ad executives, brand managers, and academics" who read Brandchannel.com...

Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast...


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