By guest blogger Mike Bock

Apple’s K-12 business is booming as hardware sales have doubled since a year ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a conference call with reporters Tuesday. In the education industry, iPads are now outselling Macs 2 to 1, as the company reported selling 1 million iPads and 500,000 Macs to schools last quarter.
Apple isn’t doing as well as analysts expected in the third quarter of fiscal 2012, but the Cupertino, Calif.-based company might have tapped into a gold mine with school sales. Ed-tech analysts aren’t sure exactly what is driving the demand for Apple products in the classroom, but a reduced price tag on the now $399 iPad 2 seems to be helping, All Things D reported:

“The reason that we [adopted a lower price point for the iPad 2] was because we believed that sales would be incrementally larger if there was price elasticity,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said during the call. “We knew there were buyers that really wanted the best product, but needed it to be a little less expensive. … So I think the lower price did help our sales. And I think it’s particularly helping in K-12. The adoption rate of iPad in education is something I’d never seen from any technology product in history. Usually, education tends to be fairly conservative in terms of buying, or K-12 does, and we’re not seeing that at all on the iPad.”

In total, Apple sold 17.0 million iPads during the third quarter of fiscal 2012, an 84 percent unit increase over the same period a year earlier.