The Commission on Audit (COA) recently completed a technical comparison between the controversial DepEd laptops versus competitors in the same price range. A few months ago, the breaking news taking the internet by storm was that the Department of Education had allegedly purchased budget laptops at exorbitant prices. This was immediately flagged by the Commission on Audit since the cost per laptop skyrocketed from just Php 35,046 per unit to Php 58,300 each. Due to this, the quantity purchased was also lowered from over 65,000 to just shy of 40,000 laptops.
We did our own deep diving and found out that these DepEd laptops were only equipped with Intel Celeron processors, which aren’t inherently terrible but can be found within the Php 20K range. A list of better deals in the Php 60K range was even published on our website. Unsurprisingly, representatives over at DepEd claimed that they had nothing to do with the bidding and procurement of these gadgets, which may be untrue according to Senator Jinggoy Estrada.
The COA has now shown a comparo between the DepEd Dell laptops and an HP laptop within the declared PHP 58-60K range, particularly opening up common school-use applications and booting up. Apps specifically used were just the Microsoft Office suite and Zoom, a common set for school use and meetings. This makes sense since public school teachers will be the ones using these devices.
Looking at the results, the HP opened applications 7-10x faster than the DepEd Dell laptops in this COA experiment. Most only took more or less five seconds to open, while others struggled and even took as long as nearly half a minute. That’s valuable class time down the drain. The only time when the numbers came close is in shutting off. This could be attributed to the use of an SSD versus an HDD in budget devices, as well as a significantly more powerful processor with an Intel Core i5.
According to the Inquirer’s report, COA Auditor Job Aguirre Jr. had this to say: “Just imagine if sabay-sabay ‘yung application. So, it confirms na talagang ‘yung reklamo ng mga teachers is talagang mabagal.” However, Dell Country Manager Ronnie Latinazo refuted that the video might be misleading because no supplier actually offered a Core i5 device during the bid itself. This statement remains to be verified as of now.
The supplier behind the aforementioned HP laptop, Advance Solutions Inc. representative Fritzie Ventenilla, reported that they lost the bid despite having a lower one than the winning supplier. Additionally, their proposed laptops are much faster.
We’ll have to see solid evidence behind all these statements, so we’ll keep you posted on further progressions on this COA investigation on the DepEd laptops.
