The Los Angeles (LA) school district seems to have stepped on the brakes when it comes to placing an iPad in the hand of every student, and not just to expand the program to include laptops and hybrids. In fact, voters did approve of a bond sale to spend a whopping $1 billion when it comes to upgrading the school district’s technology assets, with a first approval of $30 million to pick up 30,000 iPads in order to kick off a trial of the new technology, alongside expectations that this particular contract could eventually increase to the tune of $500 million after a complete roll out of the program.
It looks like the iPad roll out is now stopped at the moment, where some of the hybrid and laptops that are being tried out include machines from Lenovo, the Surface Pro 2 from Microsoft, Chromebooks being a possibility, as well as other options from Dell.
I would not be too worried if I were Apple concerning the iPad purchase program come grinding to a halt – there is always the bigger market out there in other countries, but certainly half a billion dollars in sales is a nice figure to add to the company’s bottom line at the end of the day under the sales column. However, this incident goes to show that healthy competition does bring about the best in different companies.
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