Report: Chromebooks make up more than half devices found in schools

While Apple might be “all the rage” these days among certain sects, this wasn’t always the case. Long before Macs were associated with artists, videographers, and other creative types they were instead targeted primarily at another crowd altogether: students and schools. In today’s world though, Chromebooks have apparently stolen the education spotlight.

According to a new report from CNBC, Chromebooks now make up over half of all devices found in classrooms in the United States. Apple continues to be an important force in education, but over the past three years Apple’s marketshare in education has reportedly dropped from 52 percent to just 24. Microsoft has seen similar decline, going from 43 to 24 percent.

That’s a far cry from the way things were during my 90s childhood. In those days, pretty much every school computer lab was dominated by Macs, with a few Windows (or sadly sometimes even DOS..) machines found in a few classrooms here and there. And most of those machines were at any given moment playing either Oregon Trail or some variation of SimCity. Those were the days.

A lot has changed it seems, and in very little time, given Chromebooks made up less than 1 percent of the education space in 2012. To put it all into perspective, Chromebooks have made up 4.4 million of 8.9 million devices sold to schools and school districts this year, and every school day 30k Chromebooks are reportedly activated.

It’s been amazing to us to see that growth happen just in that short amount of time. If you look at the overall market for devices in education, it’s actually expanded a lot and Chromebooks have actually taken a lot of the expansion. – Rajen Sheth, Google’s director of product management for Android and Chrome in business and education

While it’s great to see Google’s Chromebooks on the rise, both in education and even among general consumers, the cloud-centric platform’s gains in education aren’t completely surprising. After all, Chromebooks are highly affordable, easy to manage, very secure, and students are doing more and more in the cloud, meaning that “full-fledged” traditional PCs aren’t necessary for the average student.

The only important question I have left is “Can they play SimCity?” (The answer is sort of.) What do you think, surprised to see Chromebook’s meteoric rise in schools?