DepEd procures over 170,000 MacBooks for teachers, staff

MANILA, Philippines (Second update, 12:48 p.m.) — The Department of Education has bought 172,654 Apple MacBook Neo laptops for public school teachers and administrative staff at about P43,000 each.

DepEd said on Tuesday, November 3, it had concluded competitive bidding for the laptops. Of the total, 169,008 will go to teachers and 3,646 to administrative officers. Deliveries are scheduled from this month through March 2027.

"For the longest time, our teachers have carried the heavy personal burden of buying their own laptops or maintaining outdated equipment just to keep up with lesson plans," Education Secretary Sonny Angara said in a statement. "Under the vision of President Marcos, we are changing the narrative."

The MacBooks bring the number of teacher laptops DepEd has contracted so far under its computerization program to 231,725, including 62,717 Windows-based units. 

That is enough for roughly one in four of the country's nearly 900,000 public school teachers. 

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has pledged that every public school teacher will have a laptop before his term ends in 2028, and DepEd had planned to buy more than 250,000 laptops for teaching personnel under its 2026 budget.

The pace of the program has drawn criticism, particularly from the teachers' group the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT). In a statement in August, the group faulted DepEd for handing out voice amplifiers while teachers were still waiting for their own laptops, and said the planned 250,000 units would still leave most teachers without one. 

At the time, DepEd replied that the laptop purchase was taking longer because the devices had to meet standards for performance, durability, battery life and warranty.

DepEd said the P43,000 price covers the laptop, built-in productivity software, delivery and teacher training, and is about P6,900 below the base model's suggested retail price. 

At that price, the order is worth about P7.4 billion. The department did not disclose the exact contract amount.

The five-year warranty on the MacBook Neos is a first for DepEd's laptop purchases, the department said. Retail units carry one year of coverage.

The unit price is about P15,300 lower than what DepEd paid in 2021, when the procurement service of the Department of Budget and Management bought 39,583 laptops for teachers at P58,300 each. 

The Commission on Audit later flagged that P2.4-billion purchase as overpriced given the laptops ran on outdated processors.

Apple chief executive John Ternus shared the deal during the company's fourth-quarter earnings call early Tuesday, Manila time, his first since he succeeded Tim Cook in September. 

"I'm feeling great about the opportunities ahead for Apple, from our product roadmap and broad range of services to promising areas like health, emerging markets, enterprise and education," Ternus said. "As one example, we recently secured our biggest education deal ever for Mac with the Department of Education in the Philippines. They're going to deploy 170,000 MacBook Neos to teachers and staff."

"Opportunities like this bring more users into our ecosystem and help fuel growth across our business," he added.

Apple launched the MacBook Neo in March as its cheapest laptop. It runs on the A18 Pro, a chip first used in iPhones. 

It also raised the laptop's Philippine retail price by P10,000 in June amid a global shortage of memory chips.

Apple also told analysts that Mac supplies would remain constrained through the October-to-December quarter, when DepEd's first deliveries are due.

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