Dive Brief:
- A deal between New York City's Department of Education and Google will see Acer and Samsung's Google-powered Chromebooks, as well as Google Apps for Education, used by more than one million students in 1,800 schools.
- Not all of these schools will be new customers, according to a blog post by the department's CIO, who wrote that a main reason the city decided to go with Google was because so many NYC schools were already using its tools.
- This news follows last week's International Data Corporation (IDC) report, which found that, in 2014, Chromebooks were the No. 1 seller among tablet and laptop products for the K-12 sector.
Dive Insight:
The NYC news and the IDC report both succeed a July announcement that 1 million Chromebooks were sold to schools in Q2 of 2014, and an August prediction by market research firm Gartner that, by the end of this year, 5.2 million Chromebooks will be shipped. So what makes Chromebooks such winners? The Google laptops are commonly commended for their easy deployment and management. According to TechCrunch, teachers don't need extensive tech knowledge to set up the devices and, most notably, Chromebooks have a lower cost than alternatives, like Apple's iPad.