The Education department says the units come with a five-year warranty and will be delivered to public school teachers and staff from November 2026 to March 2027
The Department of Education (DepEd) has secured 172,654 Apple MacBook Neo laptops for public school teachers and administrative staff at about P43,000 per unit, the agency announced on Tuesday, November 3, 2026, after completing the competitive bidding for its computerization program.
Of the total, 169,008 units will go to teachers and 3,646 to administrative officers. Deliveries are set to begin this month and run until March 2027, with unboxing sessions planned at cluster and mega-cluster launches across Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao.
“For the longest time, our teachers have carried the heavy personal burden of buying their own laptops or maintaining outdated equipment just to keep up with lesson plans. Under the vision of President Marcos, we are changing the narrative,” Education Secretary Sonny Angara said.
“It isn’t just about handing out world-class hardware with five-year warranties; it’s about giving our educators the best tools, backed by robust training so they can focus on what matters most: teaching our children,” he added.
DepEd said the P43,000 unit price is about P6,900 below the suggested retail price of the base model in the Philippines. The package covers the laptop, built-in productivity tools, delivery and logistics, and professional development for recipients. The five-year warranty is a first for the department’s laptop purchases, compared with the usual one-year coverage.
The agency will also work with Apple on GuroXL, a teaching framework meant to help teachers bring the technology into classroom lessons.
Apple chief executive John Ternus mentioned the deal during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call. “We recently secured our biggest education deal ever for Mac with the Department of Education in the Philippines. They’re going to deploy 170,000 MacBook Neos to teachers and staff,” he said.
With the new batch, DepEd has now awarded contracts for 231,725 teacher laptops under its computerization program, including 62,717 Windows-based units. That covers roughly one in four of the country’s nearly 900,000 public school teachers. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has pledged that every public school teacher will have a laptop before his term ends in 2028.
The slow pace of the rollout has drawn criticism from the Alliance of Concerned Teachers, which said in August that the planned purchase would still leave most teachers without a unit. DepEd earlier explained that the procurement took time because the devices had to meet standards on performance, durability, battery life and warranty.
The new unit price is about P15,300 lower than the P58,300 per laptop paid in 2021, when 39,583 teacher laptops were bought through the procurement service of the Department of Budget and Management. That purchase was later flagged by the Commission on Audit as overpriced.
Malacañang welcomed the deal. “Sa kabuuan, layunin ang programang ito na palakasin ang digital skills ng mga guro, mapagaan ang kanilang trabaho at maisulong ang mas makabago at teknolohiyang nakabatay sa edukasyon sa mga pampublikong paaralan,” Palace Press Officer Claire Castro said.