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London’s Met Police abandons plan to issue 15-20,000 iPads after spending $13k/iPad on a trial

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London’s Metropolitan Police service has apparently abandoned plans to issue iPad minis to 15-20,000 frontline officers after spending a total of £6M ($8.58M) on a trial of just 641 devices. This means that the trial ended up costing the taxpayer £9,360 ($13,397) per iPad.

The Inquirer obtained the information using a Freedom of Information request.

The Met spent £1.2m on hardware during that time, including the iPads and supporting servers and accessories, £4.1m on custom software development, which included the databases to support mobile operations, £600,000 on business and management activities and £100,000 on licences. The costs also include the replacement of 12 tablets during the trial period … 

Just one month ago, the Met Police’s mobile technology lead Adrian Hutchinson was singing their praises.

We are a modern crime fighting machine, but our officers still have to make hand-written statements and then type them up back at the office […] With the iPads, officers can take statements electronically, embed images, get people to sign with a fingerprint and load all this into the system on the scene instantly […]

Emergency response officers had been spending a lot of time in police stations doing routine admin. That’s not the right place to do it. So now they can do that on the tablet, in their car, in an area we know is a crime hot spot.

No reason was given for abandoning the plans despite what had been described as a successful trial. A police spokesperson simply said that the 641 iPads remain in use, but the service decided against the planned rollout across the service.

An unspecified proportion of the money spent was on backend systems and software which would be usable with other mobile technology, but as yet no decision has been reached on what form that technology might take.

Via CoM

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Comments

  1. AeronPeryton - 8 years ago

    I wish governments who were smart with tech were also smart with money.

    I could buy the most expensive iPad on the market, load it with the top 50 freemium games, make sure a black credit card is attached to the app store account and logged in, give it to a seven-year old for the day, and still not spend that much money on a single iPad.

    • codemonkey85 - 8 years ago

      To be fair, the article title is a bit misleading – the iPads themselves didn’t cost as much as that. See this quote from the article:

      > The Met spent £1.2m on hardware during that time, including the iPads and supporting servers and accessories

      It’s unclear how much of that money was spent on iPads vs backend hardware, but clearly the bulk of the investment was in custom software:

      > £4.1m on custom software development

      • AeronPeryton - 8 years ago

        I know, my example didn’t just include cost of the ‘Pad either. My point still stands. That’s an absurd amount of money to spend on software. They either got ripped off or someone was skimming off the top.

      • Rich Davis (@RichDavis9) - 8 years ago

        yeah, part of the development costs is the server app and then a lessor cost is the iOS app. But they bought servers and networking equipment, which they probably bought Cisco or some other networking equipment that was similar in price and that stuff is what jacks up the per “iPad” cost. What’s silly is to do the same thing with an Android tablet is going to cost about the same amount of money, or Surface tablets would probably cost more since Windows client apps are more costly to develop than iOS apps. Now, the Police don’t have any tablet to use.

  2. Scott (@ScooterComputer) - 8 years ago

    This is EXACTLY the reason Apple needs to intro an OEM ~6″ 4:3 iPad nano and enable the Phone features of the LTE chipset. The iPad mini is too BIG, and the aspect ratio of the iPhone Plus is too constraining. Better yet, Apple should just get out of the way and let 3rd party manufacturers buy rights and core hardware from Apple, like they did with the Newton and Symbol Technologies, and let them build what they want/need. (Or, perhaps better, offer such manufacturing as a service; when are stockholders REALLY going to see Apple’s supply chain expertise blossom and make the company money?) LOOK at that device the officer is carrying! It is huge, and bulky. There is a LOT of money in that industry; Apple is currently ignoring it.

    • Jake Becker - 8 years ago

      Please never utter the term “iPad nano” ever again.

      • J.latham - 8 years ago

        It definitely shouldn’t be a 4th size of iPad but 6 inch iPod with LTE would be a pretty great on the go tablet, especially for children. Then, just drop the iPad mini and call it a day.

      • Grayson Mixon - 8 years ago

        It wouldn’t necessarily be bad to rebrand the iPod Touch as a tiny iPad. It makes more sense in the iPad family than it does in the iPod family.

    • John Smith - 8 years ago

      I don’t think this is a bad idea – but don’t call it an iPad. Basically something akin to the iPod touch, wifi or wifi + cellular. Perhaps a bit more rugged or with rugged case as an option. I see a market for this, both projects like this and for kids.

    • Jurgis Ŝalna - 8 years ago

      Yeah and install GovOS on it!

  3. Jake Becker - 8 years ago

    Literally I don’t understand this article. But it’s “public services” so I don’t expect to.

  4. modeyabsolom - 8 years ago

    They’re probably planning to go with Android instead. /s

  5. Grayson Mixon - 8 years ago

    There’s two ways to look at this.

    1. It’s so expensive, they just need to cut their losses before they spend any more.
    2. Most of the costs of the pilot are flat, sunk costs. So, the only way to make it economical is to expand it.

    Think about it. The first iPhone costed millions of dollars, but that’s because of the R&D, the manufacturing setup, all the flat costs. Each iPhone that rolled off the assembly line after that was far cheaper. If Apple had stopped has one iPhone, it would not have been economical. The only way to recoup the cost was to keep making them.

    $13k per iPad is high, but that’s because there were very few iPads to spread out the cost of software development, internal infrastructure, and business process changes. But that stuff has already been done. Each iPad they add would be significantly cheaper, bringing down the average cost per iPad.

    It’s quite possible that the worst thing they could do is abandon the program.

    • Grayson Mixon - 8 years ago

      Looking at the numbers, £1.3 million is the amount directly attributable to the units, assuming that licenses and servers would scale with the number of users (more users require more servers to handle the load, and that assumes their current infrastructure was maxed out to handle the 641 tablets, we’ll leave out the 12 replacements as they no longer require server resources or replacement licenses, and the cost of the physical hardware is a small enough percentage that it shouldn’t make a big difference in total costs).

      So that would be £2,028 ($2,880) per iPad. That includes hardware, software, and the spread for the server infrastructure.

      That’s still pretty expensive. They are spending three times as much on the software and servers as the actual iPad costs. Now, that assumes that their server infrastructure costs would scale linearly with users. It’s possible that their current servers are only loaded at 10%. So, the server cost per user would be 10% of the number I’ve used, but there’s no way to determine that.

      I would say, at most, the incremental cost per iPad is $2,880. It could be lower.

      But that’s still expensive.

  6. The title is click-bait. The iPads weren’t the most expensive cost, it was the custom software development. The average cost would drop dramatically as they added more iPads. Instead, they plan on abandoning the project and not use the custom software that they spent most of their money on developing.

    That’s like building a house and not living in it because you don’t want to spend the money on the utilities.

  7. shareef777 - 8 years ago

    Sounds to me like some corrupt politicians hooked up their buddies in the technology sector.

    • Jurgis Ŝalna - 8 years ago

      Such costs actually come from regulatory requirements and general bureaucracy in any large organisation. Pretty sure it cost much more to develop iOS POS terminals used at Apple stores.

  8. John Smith - 8 years ago

    $13k per iPad is obviously misleading. 2/3 of the money (£4.1m) was spent on custom software. Then there was servers and personnel costs. I don’t see anything to show they paid above retail for the actual iPads.

    Total cost £6m is still a lot – but that seems to be the sort of money these trials cost. I once saw one in a hospital that came to nothing. It was supposed to save so much time the staff costs saved would make it an overall saving. It crashed three or four times and the doctors/nurses went against it – said it was getting in the way of their work, might kill a patient. They went back to paper and desktop PCs. That cost millions for a much smaller trial than this.

    UK cops had big funding cuts. For all we know maybe this scheme did work – if they don’t have the money for more iPads then they don’t have money, whether it works of not.

    If they just got sick of Apple – the criminals friends – and refused to buy more Apple hardware, then that would be funny.

  9. Jay Froscheiser - 8 years ago

    Why does the article headline make it sound like they spent rediculous money on Ipads? That isn’t what they spent on the Ipads, thats what the entire project cost with the bulk being custom software and servers. I build/sell stock market data and analysis tools. That would be like my customer saying they paid $10,000 for my product because they include the cost of the internet connectivity, commissions and trading losses when in reality my product cost $75.

    • Ben Lovejoy - 8 years ago

      The entire project cost was $6M. Hopefully a decent chunk of that will be recovered when they switch to alternative devices (assuming they actually do), but if you were going to decide iPads are too expensive, that’s a decision that ought to have been made up-front.

  10. Grayson Mixon - 8 years ago

    I will jump in here on Ben’s side. I don’t think the headline is misleading. I think the point is to point out they are stupid for stopping and stranding their investment instead of continuing and taking advantage of their now sunk costs.

    I don’t think Ben is pointing out that expanding the program would be bad. I think Ben is pointing out that if they stop now, they are wasting the money they have already invested.

    It’s similar to the headline “Apple invests $100 million in 10 phone pilot, promptly stops making phones”. The implicit criticism is “Why did you stop after just 10 phones?”

    • Ben Lovejoy - 8 years ago

      Indeed. Some of the sunk costs will be recoverable if they buy different devices instead (presumably Android ones), but a decent chunk of it will have been invested in the iOS platform. Given everyone seems to think the trial was a success, abandoning it at this point seems silly.

  11. paulkrupa - 8 years ago

    iPads cost less than $1000 each so the cost per iPad is less than $700,000. Perhaps they got the Applecare as well. Nevertheless, cost per iPad is an ill-informed metric that contributes nothing to the analysis. The project is to expedite police work and regain officer time policing. The cost to do that involves development of a system that includes iPads as well as equally significant application development. Just what point is made to identify cost/ipad? None. Perhaps if you compare the same system with Android devices it could be meaningful but again you need to consider the all-in costs.
    At least it sounds as if they did not skimp on developing a working prototype program. Further, the fact that the units are still in use indicates continued data collection.
    I don’t think the concept of tablet based police support is a bad idea. In fact, it would surprise me if it did not improve the targeted tasks. However, there is insufficient information to assess what the program scope and success metric.

  12. Rob Miller - 8 years ago

    Very poorly written headline. They spent normal market amount on the ipads, and then spent a lot of other services to try to get a system in place to use the iPads. Apple (or a reseller) didn’t charge them $13,000+ per iPad.

    • Ben Lovejoy - 8 years ago

      A headline is not the story – it summarises the story, in this case what they spent and what they got. The story explains the detail.

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Avatar for Ben Lovejoy Ben Lovejoy

Ben Lovejoy is a British technology writer and EU Editor for 9to5Mac. He’s known for his op-eds and diary pieces, exploring his experience of Apple products over time, for a more rounded review. He also writes fiction, with two technothriller novels, a couple of SF shorts and a rom-com!


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