The Department of Education (DepEd) has started handing out its MacBook Neos to teachers, beginning with 209 units for 10 public schools in Dagupan City, DepEd said in a press release. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Education Secretary Sonny Angara led the handover at Dagupan City National High School.
That school got 72 of the 209 units. It has about 5,000 students and 312 teachers and staff, and before this it had only four official laptops for its teachers.
The 209 are the first of 231,725 teacher laptops DepEd has awarded: 169,008 MacBook Neos and 62,717 Windows laptops, plus 3,646 more Neos for administrative officers. DepEd puts the price at about Php 43,000 (about $680) a unit, the figure in our first story on the deal, and it paid about the same for the Windows laptops.
Every laptop will be enrolled in DepEd’s mobile device management system and stays government property, the department’s November 7th announcement adds. Teachers who are promoted or moved out of teaching have to hand theirs back, and selling or transferring one without permission is prohibited.
That enrollment answers part of one of our five questions about the deal: who keeps the Macs running. Neither announcement says which device management software it is or who runs it.
To qualify, a teacher needs an active teaching assignment, a DepEd email account with multi-factor authentication turned on, and no working government- or school-issued laptop received between January 1st, 2023, and November 6th. Owning a personal laptop doesn’t count against anyone.
Teachers who actively lead educational technology efforts, such as ICT coordinators, come first, and seniority earns no priority. When a priority group still has more teachers than laptops, the school draws lots in front of witnesses, by hand or in the Teacher Assignment for Laptop Allocation (TALA) app, DepEd’s new system for tracking school laptops.
Schools have until November 15th to finalize their recipient lists in TALA, and suppliers have until March 2027 to deliver every laptop. Teachers, lock in.
