I just re-checked the Apple site because I’m utterly confused as to why the L.A. school district would be buying $770 iPads when the $499 models are perfectly fine for school use (helped with a few deployments myself over the past few years).
I’m guessing they went with the 64 GB wifi models ($699 retail) for some reason (oh but students will need lots of space because more is better and the cloud is insecure!) instead of the perfectly reasonable and much cheaper 16 GB $499 models?
Weird.
According to the L.A. Times, a new school district budget shows that iPads will cost $770 each. Apple’s discount on the tablets doesn’t kick in until the District buys at least 520,000 of them. That will cost approximately $400 million. In a statement to the Times, officials said that earlier cost estimates, “preceded the actual procurement process.” The District went on to say, “The negotiated discount [i.e. $678] does not go into effect until the district has reached the $400-million spending threshold.”
via L.A. Unified’s iPad Rollout is Way Over Budget | PadGadget.
And who goes ahead with an order this large (and with this much national scrutiny) when you don’t have the final price from Apple nailed down??
New math indeed.
I don’t understand bureaucracies (and evidently they don’t understand technology or bulk purchasing or business economics).