Rathores blog

During its third fiscal quarter earnings conference call, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer revealed that the three month period was the best ever for education iPad sales, with sales nearly doubling in the K-12 market.

"The iPad continues to be a great success in the U.S. education market," said Oppenheimer. "Even though, as I mentioned earlier, we achieved all-time record Mac sales to U.S. education institutions during the quarter, we sold more than twice as many iPads as Macs."

A driving force behind the iPad's high education adoption rate was the reduced price of the iPad 2, a carry-over model costing $399 and whose target audience were students. Apple CEO Tim Cook stated" that while the third-generation iPad was the quarter's top seller, the legacy tablet sold just under 1 million units to educational institutions during the second calendar quarter".

Apple sold 17 million iPads over the quarter, a 84 percent increase from the 9.25 million sold during the same time frame one year ago. The adoption of the iPad in the classroom shows that education is moving toward a more hands on advanced approach.

Cook also stated:

"A more affordable tablet was key in garnering sales at the education level and gives much of the credit to the legacy iPad 2's new pricing scheme".

"The adoption rate of iPad in education is something I've never seen from any technology product in history", Cook said. "Usually education tends to be a fairly conservative institution in terms of buying, orK-12 does, and we're not seeing that at all on the iPad"