Thursday, December 10, 2009

Quick Question


OK, peeps, answer me this, that I will put out there before heading into my final final for the semester:


Why is it that Apple computers, Macs, whatever they were and are now, are no longer the choice for educational institutions? I mean, I wonder, because as a battle-scarred veteran educator, I learned and taught on Apples/Macs. But now I am sitting here in the library at school printing out a paper and thinking, I am working on a B.GatesBSMachine. Why?


Sure, those cat-tastically named (as the FFM discovered in recently researching options beyond the B.GatesBSMachine) are expensive, when the price list is set next to the other crap brand (or Dog, as the Fabo Fwamer so appropriately noted.) But, as the Fabo Fwamer also aptly mentioned, one does get what one pays for.


Did our educational leadership sell out to B.Gates like they did to the Business-Exec-Cum-University-Prez jerks?


2 comments:

robrohr said...

Actually, you hit the nail on the head. The non-apple machines and software are just plain less expensive than the apple boxes. Over time, the prices of PCs drop. Apples not so much. And though you may not believe it, educational institutions are not made of infinite money. Big labs, big software & hardware costs. The more expensive the machines, the less frequently they can be upgraded.

On the flip side, I know that here at the Business School at UVM, though we are heartlessly wedded to the BGates software stack, fully 2/3 of our students bought Macs this year because the Mac hardware can easily run both OS X and Windows 7 and all associated software. So Mac is not dead in Ed. If anything, it is experiencing a resurgence thanks to Bootcamp and Parallels.

Yours in Higher Ed,
Rob

Tom said...

And, just to instigate, don't YOU own an Acer?...