Monopolies, dumped hardware and rising costs: the real price of digital learning in South Africa

What the numbers show

In a parliamentary briefing in September 2025, the departments of basic education and communications and digital technologies reported that a total of 545,938 ICT devices were procured for learners in South Africa over the 2022 to 2024 financial years. In the same period, 30,818 devices were procured for teachers, and 10,588 classrooms were equipped with ICT resources for teaching and learning.

BYOD, Chromebooks and a localised monopoly

Because the government cannot afford the estimated cost to provide a device to every learner, most of the public education market operates on a bring your own device (BYOD) model. For many schools and parents, the device of choice has been the Google Chromebook.

Werner Joubert, country head at Asus South Africa, told Daily Maverick that only a handful of Chrome partners are authorised to license the Chrome Education ecosystem in South Africa. He described a top-down approach that limits who can supply the required platform and creates a situation where schools “have to purchase from them, or you don’t purchase them.” Joubert said the required certification becomes costly and that this friction “goes against what we want to achieve about making education affordable.”

Grey market imports and bricked devices

To avoid inflated local costs, some independent schools and parents have turned to the grey market. Daily Maverick reports bulk shipments of cheap, refurbished Chromebooks being imported from overseas only to be discovered with forced re-enrolment locks, cryptographically tied to the original US or European school districts that owned them. The result, the article says, is thousands of unusable, bricked devices with no local warranty support.

Daily Maverick contacted Google Africa for response and clarity but the company had not replied by the time of publication.

Retail pressure and total cost of ownership

The BYOD model has moved the financial burden onto parents and created opportunity for consumer electronics retailers. Retailers, the article says, often shift ageing stock to the student market as cheap consumer laptops that lack the long-term support and durability required for schools.

Daily Maverick notes that Microsoft ended support for Windows 10 in October 2025, leaving many machines suddenly outdated in schools that cannot meet Windows 11 hardware requirements. Breakages and out-of-warranty repairs drive up the true cost of ownership.

Retailers also use BYOD policies to upsell, sometimes convincing parents that high-spec machines are required for basic schoolwork.

Apple’s play and changing price points

Apple has entered the education market with the launch of the MacBook Neo. Daily Maverick reports the device is being offered in South Africa at a R12,000 price point for a full metal chassis Mac. Chris Dodd, managing director at iStore, described the strategy as a way to capture the high school demographic and expand into new geographic and economic markets.

“This new pricing tier will allow us to extend into geographic areas that we would not normally have been,” Dodd told Daily Maverick.

iStore added the MacBook Neo to its partner school purchase programme and offered a R3,000 discount incentive for trading in current PCs, after initially denying questions from Daily Maverick for weeks.

Teachers left behind

Despite hardware shifts, the article warns a critical element is being overlooked: the teacher. Educational apps, platforms and devices are often developed without educator consultation. Rod Smith, managing director for international education at Cambridge University Press and Assessment, described the hardware-first approach as a systemic failure.

“88% of those teachers are saying that students’ attention span is noticeably shorter than it was … and is getting shorter,”

Smith said that when technology is introduced without foundational pedagogical training, learners engage in what he calls “cognitive offloading,” using devices to think for them and missing out on “deep learning” that would allow them to benefit from technology.

What needs to change

Smith told Daily Maverick that conversations are slowly shifting toward an evidence-based discussion about technology’s impact and that tech giants are interested in talking to traditional textbook publishers about education. But he cautioned that without matching hardware deployment with robust teacher training and a joined-up government strategy for curriculum, teachers and learners, the digital divide will widen.

The article concludes that simply buying cheaper laptops or upgrading operating systems will not solve South Africa’s digital education dilemma. Until priorities move from vendor profit margins to supporting teachers’ lesson delivery, the technology in classrooms risks remaining “highly expensive distractions.”