Henrico County, Va.’s School Board voted on Thursday to equip its high school students and faculty with 15,800 laptop computers made by Dell, according to a report in the Richmond Times-Dispatch . It’s a crushing defeat for Apple, which made headlines four years ago when it won a contract to outfit Henrico County’s middle schools with its own iBook laptop. The new contract is valued at US$17.9 million, according to the report.
Henrico County ultimately acquired 23,000 iBooks for its high school and middle school students and faculty — a $24.2 million, four-year lease. At the time it was the single biggest sale of laptop computers to a school system in the nation. Since then, other school districts have followed suit with “one-to-one” computing initiatives that provide students with a laptop of their own to use, although the scale has varied, and so has the vendor, although Apple has had numerous successes in this field.
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