bsd220tech: New iPad and MacBook Air Devices Coming Soon!

Tuesday, April 8, 2025

New iPad and MacBook Air Devices Coming Soon!

The Board of Education voted on March 31, 2025, to enter new leases to update Barrington 220’s iPad devices and MacBook Air laptops for staff and students. These devices will continue to support our district’s One to World program that provides iPad devices to all students, allowing access to real-world learning experiences while supporting our mission to empower personal excellence in every learner. The new leases follow the district’s lease cycles established back in 2019 where we keep our iPad devices for 3 years and laptops for 4 years.

Over time, the Tech & Innovation Department has learned that the lease cycles we use represent a “sweet spot” in allowing our students and staff to use current technology, maintain strong asset recovery pricing, and allow the Tech Team to efficiently support a fewer number of devices. Notably:

Our devices are fully supported by Apple and are able to run the most current operating systems (including mission-critical security updates).
Students and staff are able to use new hardware-dependent features within a predictable timeframe.
All students and staff devices have access to the same devices and features.
Asset recovery (sell-back pricing) has returned approximately 25% of the original device cost back to the district budget when we sell our used devices to third-party services at the end of our leases.

The 2025–26 school year represents the first time in the past decade where both of our major leases (iPad and laptop) are renewed at the same time. While this timing challenges the Tech Team to swap all our devices within a few months, we will provide a detailed plan to complete the implementations soon after the delivery and setup of our new devices.

The specifications for our new devices are as follows:

iPad