New MacBook laptops for teachers can’t be sold or pawned, says Angara

Education Secretary Sonny Angara shows one of the new MacBook Neo laptops purchased for school teachers and staff at a Palace briefing Nov. 10, 2026.

Department of Education

MANILA, Philippines — Teachers and school staff who will receive the Department of Education’s newly purchased MacBook laptops will not be able to sell or pawn them off, Education Secretary Sonny Angara said Tuesday, November 10.

Angara told a Malacañang press briefing that the laptops remain government property and are enrolled in DepEd’s device management system, which allows it to lock or disable devices remotely if they are stolen, sold or pawned. 

Those who attempt to sell the laptops may face administrative and criminal charges, the DepEd secretary said.

“These cannot be sold because they remain government property. Every school has a property custodian who keeps track of the inventory and makes sure the laptops are used properly,” Angara said in Filipino.

DepEd is distributing 172,654 MacBook Neo laptops from this month until March 2027. Of these, 169,008 will go to teachers and 3,646 to administrative staff. The department is also giving out 62,717 Windows laptops to teachers.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. joined the distribution of the first batch of laptops on Monday, November 9 at Dagupan City National High School in Pangasinan.

DepEd bought each MacBook unit for about P43,000, or around P6,900 less than the P49,900 retail price of the base model in the Philippines. That put the cost of the MacBooks alone at about P7.4 billion. 

Apple chief executive John Ternus has called it the company’s biggest education deal.

DepEd estimates that each package is worth more than P70,000 once software, delivery to schools, teacher training and the warranty are included.

Asked whether the laptops purchased had to be MacBooks, Angara said it was not DepEd's prerogative to go for Apple devices, as the brand and the supplier were picked through competitive bidding.

Angara stressed that DepEd's focus was on the specifications, in which it deliberately sought a longer warranty for the devices to help save on government costs on repairs. 

The MacBook Neo units have a five-year warranty, the first time that DepEd's laptop for teachers will have a warranty longer than a year. 

Under DepEd’s Teacher Assignment for Laptop Allocation guidelines, the new laptops will be distributed based on school and teacher populations. Schools and teachers that have not yet received a government laptop will be prioritized.

If a school has more qualified teachers than laptops in a priority group, it must hold a raffle with witnesses to pick the recipients at random.

Still falls short?

The purchase of MacBook units for teachers has not sat well with the ACT Teachers Partylist, as Rep. Antonio Tinio believes these still "fall far short of meeting the digital needs of the entire education workforce."

"Even combined with laptops already under contract, this procurement will serve only a fraction of our nearly 900,000 public school teachers. The overwhelming majority will still be left to provide for themselves," Tinio said in a statement last week.

"No school should have to resort to lotteries or contest-style distribution just to decide which of its workers get the tools of their trade. These are necessities, not prizes," he said.

The Teachers’ Dignity Coalition welcomed the purchase and distribution of the new laptops but asked DepEd to prioritize classroom teachers.