Debatable. I would argue that writing across the curriculum is a critical learning outcome even before grade 7, but your point is reasonable and I will concede it for the point of discussion.
They are losing on both issues. Yes, cost is cost. But iPads lack multiuser support for education. That's a huge issue! With Windows or Chrome OS I can set up the laptops so that 6,000 students can take one out of a cart and log in with their school credentials (LDAP or Active Directory). And then, boom (as Jobs would have said), they have access to their desktop, files, apps, and whatnot else.
With the iPads, they all have to be set up identical for all students with no personalization or file persistence. That's because Apple's multiuser model is unimplementably ridiculous! It presupposes setting up separate accounts for each classroom and the students within it. That's unrealistic, unless you're going to a rich, small, private school. And even there the organizational overhead of doing that every semester for every instructor/classroom might make it not worth it.
They only have a strong foothold with students purchasing their individual machines. And even there the top model that students choose is the MacBook Air, which is comically out of date. Neither the MacBook nor the MacBook Pro are sensible specs for ordinary college students.
On the institutional side, which is the side that matters in education, Apple is loosing badly. 20 years ago you would walk through a university computer lab, and half of the machines in there would Apple computers. Today, it's a couple of iMacs in the corner for niche uses. iBooks and PowerBooks were good choices for laptop carts, because of their robust feature set and reliability. For example, their adoption of 802.11 was so much more reliable when that was new. Network printing too!
The worst compromise with buying Apple were the external floppy drives because they dropped support a little early. But that's an understandable compromise you could live with. We were trying to get students to quit floppys in the late 90s in favor of network storage anyway.
Apple has obviously lost the plot in education. They act like they don't care anymore. Like they have given up. Google is seeing that opening and exploiting the hell out of it. Whoever wins in education, wins an entire generation of userbase. Microsoft still understands that.
