A school district’s switch to MacBook Neos signals a big problem for Google's education empire

Last week Google introduced its AI-first Googlebooks that are designed to replace Chromebooks, those mainstays at schools across the country. Today, Kansas City announced that it’s become “an all-Apple district,” with a plan to replace the 30,000 Windows PC and Chromebooks it supplies to students with MacBook Neos.

While Kansas City Public Schools made their decision before the Googlebooks announcement, it’s easy to imagine that many schools will abandon their fleets of Chromebooks for MacBook Neos now that Google is going all-in on AI in their laptops at the exact moment that Apple has introduced a price-competitive product.

Chromebooks’ classroom takeover

As of last year, 93% of school districts in the US use Chromebooks in their classrooms. That number is not lost in Google since soon after the Googlebooks announcement, it tried to reassure schools about their investment.

Google issued a post that it intends to keep its 10-year commitment to supporting ChromeOS updates, but it contained not a word about continuing to produce Chromebooks for those markets. I reached out to Google for more information, including a timetable for the transition, but did not hear back.

The post intimates that Chromebooks will be phased out, as it says that Google will facilitate a move to Googlebooks as existing Chromebooks reach the end of their lifespans.

“When the time comes, we’ll provide multiple pathways to transition over to the new experience,” the post reads.

While Google has disclosed very little about Googlebooks, what we do know is that they are built around AI, right down to how the cursor, or in Google parlance, the Magic Pointer, works. Using Googlebooks would introduce AI into the majority of classrooms across the country, a move that will undoubtedly meet with resistance from educators and parents alike.

AI is at the heart of many hotly debated issues in education and with regard to children. There are concerns about plagiarism, questions about a reliance on AI hampering educational development, and the many cases of children meeting with harm as a result of their interactions with AI.

Cost-competitive competition

Schools that do not want to tackle all of these things and are just looking for an inexpensive, hassle-free way to provide necessary tools to students can bypass Googlebooks altogether with Apple’s well-priced MacBook Neos.

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Chromebooks once cornered the education market, but they no longer have it in a corner.