Apple @ Work: Apple says MacBook Neo is pulling schools away from Windows and Chromebooks

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Apple’s latest earnings call included some K12 sales numbers around the MacBook Neo that are super interesting, considering how pricing is progressing in electronics. MacBook Neo is beginning to displace Windows and Chromebooks in K-12 in a rapid fashion.

About Apple @ Work: Bradley Chambers has been an Apple IT admin since 2009. Through his experience deploying and managing firewalls, switches, a mobile device management system, enterprise grade WiFi, 1000s of Macs, and 1000s of iPads, Bradley will highlight ways in which Apple IT managers deploy Apple devices, build networks to support them, train users, share stories from the trenches of IT management, and ways Apple could improve its products for IT departments.

Earning call information

Apple’s commentary highlighted some large district deployments moving to Neo Pinellas County Schools, one of the largest districts in Florida, which is moving its 25k students off Windows and onto MacBook Neo across its 18 high schools. In Washington, Peninsula School District 401 moved over its 8,000 students from Chromebooks to MacBook Neo. Midwest City-Del City School District in Oklahoma purchased more than 6,000 MacBook Neos to become an all-Apple district for students.

The part of this that stood out most to me was that about half of MacBook Neo’s large purchases from US education institutions last quarter displaced Windows or Chromebook devices. That’s not replacing old MacBook Air fleets with Neos. This is districts switching from ChromeOS/Windows to the Mac. According to Apple, close to half of MacBook Neo’s large purchases by US education orgs last quarter replaced Windows or Chromebooks.

Here’s the angle I keep coming back to as I consider Apple’s recent pricing increase (and it’s not just Apple). The M1 Air is still, years later, a genuinely workable machine for K-12. I’ve seen districts get five, six, seven years out of those things, and they’re still fast enough for the browser-based, Google Docs, testing-portal workload that makes up most of a student’s actual laptop use. I have 40+ of them that I use as loaners when devices need repairs, etc. The M1 Air broke the old assumption that education laptops had to be underpowered and disposable.

MacBook Neo feels like the spiritual successor to the Air in many ways. It’s not trying to be a Pro machine. It’s trying to be the laptop that a district can buy thousands of, hand to a fourteen-year-old, and still be running fine when that student graduates. The current Air is borderline a Pro machine. The price point is the whole story here, and it’s a big part of why districts like Pinellas and Midwest City-Del City are willing to rip out Windows and Chromebook fleets entirely instead of just adding Macs alongside them.

Yes, the price has crept up since launch. Everything has changed across the industry. Rising component costs have touched every laptop maker, not just Apple. I haven’t priced out a new server this year, but I can’t imagine what it would cost. What matters is the relative position on the price scale of other devices. MacBook Neo is still priced to compete directly with Chromebooks and budget Windows laptops, while running on Apple silicon.

Wrap up

I don’t think MacBook Neo’s ceiling is dominating the K-12 market. As Apple keeps pushing more performance into this line while holding the line on affordability relative to the market, I think it becomes the default laptop recommendation for a much bigger chunk of knowledge workers, not just students. Most people don’t need a MacBook Pro (or even the power of the M5 Air). They need something reliable, fast enough for everyday work, easy for IT to manage at scale, and priced so a company or a school district can buy it in bulk. The Neo will quickly become as powerful as early-generation Apple Silicon computers, and that should cover most people’s needs unless they are doing local AI workloads.

I’ll be curious to see if this pace holds up over the next few quarters. The Air never competed with the Chromebook on pure price. The Neo certainly does, though. For my big purchases this year, I didn’t buy the Neo, but it’ll likely be what I buy next year.