Sources: News Corp's education division, Amplify, is winding down sales of its tablets
Laura Colby / Bloomberg Business :
Context & Ripple Effects
Amplify's tablet push is being unwound barely a year into the broader tablet slowdown that Forrester flagged when it found sales had plateaued outside business buyers. The wind-down of device sales leaves the education division's future riding on its software business.
The retreat from hardware did not stop at the product line: within weeks, sources reported News Corp was in advanced talks to sell off Amplify entirely, ceasing tablet production while continuing software development during negotiations.
First-order effects
- Schools and districts considering Amplify devices lose that purchasing option immediately, and any remaining tablet commitments become support liabilities rather than growth lines for the division.
- Amplify's internal priorities shift to its curriculum and assessment software, which survives the wind-down even as the hardware channel closes.
Second-order effects
- A failed hardware bet inside a media conglomerate pushes News Corp toward divestiture rather than continued investment, putting Amplify's software assets on the market for other education-technology buyers.
- Rivals selling devices into classrooms face one less subsidized competitor, but also inherit a cautionary example of consumer-tablet economics failing to translate to school budgets during a plateaued market.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, education technology consolidates around software and content owners while general-purpose hardware makers serve schools directly — a split echoed years later by Apple streamlining its own sales teams for businesses, schools, and governments.
- Conglomerates funding vertically integrated device-plus-software plays face pressure to exit hardware where unit economics depend on scale they lack, concentrating ed-tech around specialists.
The trend: Tablet-market stagnation is forcing diversified conglomerates out of low-margin device sales and toward divesting or refocusing education units on software.