Dumped By The Vic Government + Beaten Up By Acer + Apple Lenovo Fights Back With New Chromebook

The Chinese Company who got beaten by Acer and Apple to a Victorian Government contract worth $85M has launched a ThinkPad 11e series in an effort to shore up their education market offering. Also bidding for the Victorian contract was JB Hi Fi Commercial. 

The new Lenovo product will be available either as a traditional laptop or in Lenovo’s “Yoga” multimode gadget, encompassing laptop, stand, tent and tablet modes.

Lenovo states the ThinkPad 11e series, with Windows or Chrome, is designed with the needs of school administrators, educators and students in mind.


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It is available with Lenovo’s Wacom Active Pen and is pre-loaded with Intel’s education software.

the ThinkPad 11e series also sports Lenovo’s Writeit software, allowing users to write directly into any application, and Reachit file management.

Pricing will start at $599 and rang up to $1399.

Acer’s contract runs for two years from March 2015 to March 2017. Acer has also won a major contract with the Federal Government up against Lenovo.

The Victorian contract loss could see Lenovo miss out on more than 40,000 units. 

Also missing out was HP and Toshiba. 

In WA Acer recently won a $100 million Western Australian whole-of-government end user contract up against Lenovo, HP and Toshiba. 

Several Australian education departments are telling ChannelNews that they are set to dump the Microsoft OS in favour of Chrome and Chromebooks. 

Last year only 146,000 Chromebooks were shipped in APAC. Gartner expects this to rise 54 percent to 225,000 units in 2015 and then hit 276,000 units in 2016.

Education departments and large Corporations looking to cut operational costs are set to be the big buyers. 

The Google Chrome OS epresenting 68.8 percent of sales in APAC, versus 16.5 in “other business” and 14.7 in consumer.

Globally, 5.7 million Chromebooks were sold in 2014, according to Gartner, while 315.9 million PCs were sold in the same period.

Pricing for the new Lenovo ThinkPad 11e will start at $599 and rang up to $1399.