However, as a parent and as a long-time Apple user, I think they are completely incompetent at multi-user scenarios in general - Classroom 2.0 is "cute" but impractical in the few times I tried to help teachers to use it, iPad multi-user is nowhere to be seen in practice, and the price points are completely outrageous (my kids' school uses iPads).
To add insult to injury, parental control is also MIA (tangent, I know, but relevant in the overall picture).
Chromebooks walk all over that - they're cheaper, have pretty decent unified management (not really business-grade, but straightforward and effective enough for K12, for instance), and they have real keyboards.
Things start flaking out a bit upmarket (when you're in college, a Chromebook and Google services might not be the best computer/environment to use depending on your major, for a lot of reasons), but in general, and from what I picked up during a deep dive into the education segment a couple of months ago, I'm not surprised they're popular.
What I _am_ surprised (and then again, not much, really) is that Google and their hardware partners don't seem to tackle European markets in earnest. I had to buy a Chromebook in the US for my own use, and if I were to replace it today I would probably have to have something shipped from the US again - they are nowhere to be found in retail in my neck of the woods, and European online retailers only seem to stock a few outdated models.
So I guess the scenario the article describes is going to remain US-only for a long while.
For a brief timeframe, our local Saturn in Germany had quite some models. But now they seem to have all but disappeared. They used to sell them on the German Google Store as well, but now they are not offer there either.
I have only been in Germany a couple of years, but there seems to be a quite strong anti-cloud/Google sentiment. (For good reasons.)
Localisation and market size are factors, obviously...
Which is foolish; they have the resources to devote to both, but they don't know how to do more than 1 thing at a time. The lack of bulk iPad management tools until recently (and I don't even know how good they are now) makes them almost unusable in a lot of school situations.
Lack of focus has a real cost, even to large companies. It's the difference between polished slick software, and a design-by-committee mess.
And I don't think they can really get by these days doing fewer things; I think they're right that an integrated ecosystem is the right answer, but part of that is, ecosystems are large. So they do need to do the more things, but they just don't seem to be doing the more things that well.
Apple would very likely _love_ to have a second or third profit generator. If you examine the profits taken on iPads, MacBooks, and everything else Apple does (see http://www.asymco.com) relative to the iPhone, it is a one trick pony.
Hard to peel apart your "focus" when 85% of your business relies on it.
They have enough cash reserves to keep going for a long time, as well as other product lines that were successful enough to get them to where they are.
tl;dr We are switching to Chromebooks next year and will be able to outfit 3 entire grade levels for almost the same price as purchasing iPads for 1 grade level. Apple has lost it's way and I'm not sure it can come back. It used to chase ideals, now it chases money.