Apple makes a Trojan horse play for the education market

Apple’s history with education is a long and twisty one. Like many folks my age, my earliest school experience with computers were an Apple IIs, carted in to a classroom, on which you could wait your turn to play Number Munchers. Later on, it was labs full of newer models where we cleverly wrote infinite BASIC loops to print “DAN IS AWESOME” all up and down the rows.

By the time I got to college, though, Macs were already in the minority. Even then, the year that the iMac debuted, I was one of just a few folks in my dorm that had an Apple computer at all.1

In more recent years, Apple’s found itself squeezed out of the K12 education market by the advent of cheap Chromebooks, which often cost just a couple hundred bucks for a unit—a price point that Apple couldn’t (or chose not) to meet with either the Mac or iPad. Couple that with Google’s dominance in courseware, and some big splashy Apple deals ended up evaporating—or worse—and it hasn’t been the best time for the company in education.

A couple recent moves by Apple, however, have me wondering if Cupertino hasn’t decided to take a different tack when approaching education—one that plays more to its strengths.

Neo and improved

Point one is, of course, the new MacBook Neo. At $499 for education customers, it’s the most affordable Mac laptop ever, and tied with the cheapest Mac of all time.

There are tradeoffs, of course: no TouchID on the cheapest model, only a single high-speed USB3 port, a hard limit of 8GB of RAM. But the power of the A18 Pro, the battery life, and the decent storage options are all pretty respectable. Apple’s goal was never to build a cheap computer, after all—if you know anything about the company, it’s not going to sacrifice what it considers quality in exchange for price.

That would have been a fool’s errand anyway, since no matter how cheap Apple made the Neo, Chromebooks could, of course, still be had for cheaper (though if you start configuring the specs to be comparable to the Neo, that price gap does narrow a bit).

That said, I would argue that one aspect the MacBook Neo has going for it is that Apple Silicon has proved to have surprising longevity behind it. I recently handed down my M1 MacBook Air to my dad; that’s an almost six year old computer that I’d probably still be using if it weren’t for me running up against the drive limit, and which will no doubt serve him just fine for years to come.

I’d expect no less from the Neo, and if you amortize the cost of that $500 machine out over the lifetime of the product, you’ve got a better deal yet. (I’d also argue that the aluminum chassis of the MacBook Neo seems more likely to take a beating over the long run than a plastic Chromebook, but of course, your mileage may vary.)

Halo, Neo

But this is all beside the point. Because Apple’s strategy these days is, as I said, is about playing to its strength—and its strength is appealing not at the institutional level, but to the individual consumer. By playing to customers who might want to buy a computer for educational purposes, say for a high school student or a kid heading off to college, Apple capitalizes on the strength of its existing ecosystem and the cachet of its brand.

The MacBook Neo, after all, works seamlessly with your iPhone or your AirPods; it hooks into the Apple account you probably already have. Maybe it even runs the same apps. And it certainly doesn’t hurt that it looks cool, sleek, and colorful—unlike many a Chromebook.

Like Apple’s classic halo effect, which saw Mac sales benefit from the popularity of the iPhone and iPod, the more people using Macs for their own personal uses in education translates, if not into direct institutional sales, then at least into prevalence that can’t be ignored.

This is a considerably better situation than in my school days too: the rise of the internet and its platform agnostic nature has, fortunately, largely done away with the compatibility struggles of the ’90s and 2000s when you had to worry more about whether your organization would even support your device of choice. Not only does your MacBook Neo work at least as well as a Chromebook does with the buzziest technology—such as ChatGPT or Claude—it’s got the potential to leverage the power of Apple Silicon there, which is definitely no slouch.

Get creative

The MacBook Neo isn’t the only move that Apple’s made towards the education market in recent months, either. Take the recently launched Apple Creator Studio bundle, which offers a slew of apps for all sorts of creative applications, and which is extremely aggressive priced for education users: $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year.

Again, those apps aren’t aimed at institutional buyers so much as they are the individual user. And by getting more students to be comfortable with these affordable and accessible tools, Apple helps ensure that the next generation is well versed in its apps—thus, potentially, making them more popular than ever.

Look, I don’t expect to see large swaths of institutions plunking down money for crates of MacBook Neos—and, as someone who used to work in technology higher education, I’m well aware that process is glacial at the best of times. But the point of Apple’s strategy is that it doesn’t need to wait for those big institutional decisions; it can approach the education market bottom up. Once upon a time, people might have been forced to use whatever technology their schools had—these days, we all have technology with us all the time. We love CarPlay, for example, because it lets us bring our phones with us rather than relying on a system force-fed to us by an automaker. It’s no surprise this generation wants to use its own tech in learning too.

And, frankly, a $499 MacBook Neo with $29.99/year subscription to Apple Creator Studio is a pretty compelling offering. I won’t be surprised to see more and more individual students firing up Logic or Final Cut Pro on their citrus MacBooks next fall.

Fortunately, Apple’s place in education wasn’t so old when I was there that there wasn’t still support for the Mac. ↩