[OPINION] Apple’s laptop deal with PH’s DepEd: Why people need to keep watching

While Apple is a reputable company, the scale of the procurement makes public monitoring and transparency all the more critical

In what it called its biggest education deal to date, tech giant Apple announced Monday, November 2 (Tuesday, November 3, Manila time), that it will provide over 170,000 laptops to public school teachers in the Philippines.

The announcement brought back memories of many sleepless nights in the Rappler newsroom. Before I relocated to Silicon Valley about three years ago, then-fellow Rappler reporter Bonz Magsambol and I spent months investigating how a large share of over P1 billion worth of government-procured laptops meant for pandemic distance learning ended up for sale in retail stores.

This was separate from the 2021 laptop scandal investigated by the Senate, where state auditors flagged the Department of Education (DepEd) for buying alleged low-quality, overpriced laptops at P58,000 each, totaling a little over P2.4 billion.

Seeing Apple announce this deal, seemingly out of nowhere during its quarterly earnings call, caught me off guard. It signaled a level of confidence in a department that, when I was covering it, seemed to struggle to stop private companies from treating public procurement like a private auction house — with little regard for the care financial transactions require when they involve billions in taxpayer funds.

At first glance, the Apple deal indeed appears large.

The total contract is worth about P7.4 billion, which means Apple is making about $116 million from this single deal. For the education department, it is the largest single procurement of laptops under the historically scandal-ridden DepEd Computerization Program since at least the pandemic.

“Opportunities like this bring more users into our ecosystem and help fuel growth across our business,” Apple chief executive officer John Ternus said during the call.

The massive acquisition of over 170,000 Apple MacBooks accounts for nearly 75% of the 231,725 total teacher devices contracted under the program.

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A look at the unit cost shows it could be the most aboveboard contract compared to the computer deals of years past.

So far, we know that the cost of the MacBook Neo is priced at P43,000, well under its current market value. It officially starts at a retail price of P49,990 in the Philippines, with upgraded versions selling up to nearly P57,000 at Power Mac Center stores.

This is also much lower than the price of the nearly 40,000 laptops previously procured, which state auditors flagged for having outdated processors. The Neo is currently the Mac line’s most affordable product and runs on the same chips used in premium iPhones.

While Apple is a reputable company, the scale of the procurement makes public monitoring and transparency all the more critical.

Previous laptop scandals were only discovered after the funds had already been spent — when it was far too late to unring the bell. Those procurement failures began under then-DepEd secretary Leonor Briones, who served under former president Rodrigo Duterte until 2022.

The leakage of laptops into the retail market, largely due to the awarding of a contract to an unqualified logistics provider, continued when Vice President Sara Duterte took over the department. (READ: Tiny logistics firm bags P667-million DepEd deal | Billions worth of learning materials being held hostage)

Education Secretary Sonny Angara confirmed Tuesday that Apple participated in an open competitive bid — the default in government procurement. Still, I am curious: How did Apple find out about this opportunity in the Philippines? Did other bidders dare to compete for a contract? If so, who? And what were the other offers on the table? It is hard to imagine another company that could go up against a tech goliath like Apple.

Either way, because President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has expressed prioritizing getting teachers and students up to speed on digital literacy, the department was right not to let past corruption issues stop it from procuring the technology needed for its almost 900,000 public school teachers.

According to the DepEd, deliveries of the Neos are expected to begin immediately and run through March 2027. That is where monitoring needs to continue.

In the most recent laptop mess, the problem was not so much with the laptops themselves, but that a large portion of the 40,000 units never reached the students and schools across the country that needed them most.

Who is delivering the laptops? How will they get them to schools across the archipelago in one piece? Who is responsible if something is broken or lost along the way?  

On a more hopeful note, will this deal finally set an example of how the government can make large public procurements of high-quality products without kickbacks?

Until details of the contracts are made public, the laptops end up in teachers’ hands from Batanes to Sulu, and they work properly in the long run, it might be too early to say. But for the sake of our teachers and their students, I certainly hope so. – Rappler.com

Ryan Macasero is a reporter for the Mercury News, covering the city of San Jose, California. He is a former Rappler multimedia reporter and editor of the #BalikBayan section.