John Paczkowski

Recent Posts by John Paczkowski

Apple Wins $30 Million iPad Contract From L.A. Unified School District

blackboard_ipadHere’s one school district that won’t be availing itself of Microsoft’s “Surface for education limited-time offer”: L.A. Unified.

On Tuesday evening, the Los Angeles Unified School District awarded Apple a $30 million contract to provide its students with iPads. The deal, which was approved in a 6-0 vote by the district’s school board, will see Apple supplying about 31,000 iPads to 47 LAUSD schools at a cost of about $678 per device. That’s higher than retail, but the iPads will come preloaded with the Pearson Common Core System of Courses delivered via a new app, as well as iWork, iLife, iTunes and a variety of third-party educational apps. They also come with a three-year warranty.

The deal is a huge win for Apple. LAUSD is the nation’s second-largest school system, and its decision to award this contract to Apple, and Apple alone, is a hell of an endorsement — one that other school districts are certain to consider while mulling their own tablet deployments. Beyond that, it’s further testament to the mind share iPad is gaining in education, and the speed with which it is gaining it.

As Apple CEO Tim Cook said last year, “The adoption rate of iPad in education is something I’d never seen from any technology product in history. Usually, education tends to be fairly conservative in terms of buying, or K-12 does, and we’re not seeing that at all on the iPad.”

Certainly not with contracts like this one.

Twitter’s Tanking

December 30, 2013 at 6:49 am PT

2013 Was a Good Year for Chromebooks

December 29, 2013 at 2:12 pm PT

BlackBerry Pulls Latest Twitter for BB10 Update

December 29, 2013 at 5:58 am PT

Apple CEO Tim Cook Made $4.25 Million This Year

December 28, 2013 at 12:05 pm PT

Latest Video

View all videos »

Search »

Another gadget you don’t really need. Will not work once you get it home. New model out in 4 weeks. Battery life is too short to be of any use.

— From the fact sheet for a fake product entitled Useless Plasticbox 1.2 (an actual empty plastic box) placed in L.A.-area Best Buy stores by an artist called Plastic Jesus