Apple is losing its grip on American classrooms, which technology companies have long used to hook students on their brands for life.

Over the last three years, Apple’s iPads and Mac notebooks — which accounted for about half of the mobile devices shipped to schools in the United States in 2013 — have steadily lost ground to Chromebooks, inexpensive laptops that run on Google’s Chrome operating system and are produced by Samsung, Acer and other computer makers.

Mobile devices that run on Apple’s iOS and MacOS operating systems have now reached a new low, falling to third place behind both Google-powered laptops and Microsoft Windows devices, according to a report released on Thursday by Futuresource Consulting, a research company.

“Mac and iPad are the best tools in education to help teachers teach and students learn,” Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of product marketing, wrote in an email. “We’re incredibly passionate about education and new programs like Apple Teacher,” a site for teachers who want to learn how to more creatively use Apple tools with their students.

Apple has recently widened its education offerings. Last year, it introduced an app, called Classroom, to help teachers see and manage their students’ activities on iPads. It also created a free iPad app, called Swift Playgrounds, that introduces students to writing computer code.

Source: nytimes