Maine buys 38,600 ibooks for Public Schools

Anderson Silva writes "I just found this piece of news on MacSlash, and since I live in Maine, and I own an ibook, I thought I would pass the word along: The Maine Learning Technology Endowment has announced today that Apple has won the bid to provide Maine 6th, 7th and 8th graders with Apple iBooks and Airport wireless connection points."

Comments

Eh ? Point Please ?

[MrDalliard]

Whilst I'm aware this is obviously good news for Apple, is this newsworthy ?

Don't get me wrong, I've got an iBook too, and I love it, but I'm just wondering what "better" news is out there.

Or, are we going to encounter such a bad recession that soon the sale of bic biro gets into the news ? :-)

M.

Re:What the hell is with schools and laptops?

[czardonic]

Why spend money on hardware that is harder to replace and more expensive than desktops?

Easy:

Wasting more money allows politicians to pad the amount of money they brag about spending on kids in their district.

Helps boost the economy, by increasing the distribution of high priced equipment that is easy to break and hard to upgrade.

Re:Anyone know who was competing?

[npietraniec]

You were probably the only one then... "Why do we have to use these Crap-in-toshes?" was pretty much the general attitude where I went to school.

Re:They're not giving them away

[90XDoubleSide]

They're not giving them away, Actually the school has to pay for those ibooks

Will someone please explain to me how you can read the headline, "Maine buys 38,600 ibooks for Public Schools" and infer that they were giving them away!

Also they did not sell laptops, they sold the entire solution, with networking, hardware, and support. If a company wanted to put in a bid to provide a solution using Linux laptops they were more than free to do so, but there are several advantages Apple had in a contract for wireless labs:

• Apple has been doing wireless in all its products longer than any other major vendor
• Apple has the most hassle-free 802.11b software and hardware
• iBooks are made to be very durable and fit into backpacks
• The cost savings running Linux are much lower on laptops
• The Mac's extremely low TCO gives them an advantage in offering support and repair
• iBooks are a great deal right now, at $1199, plus a $50 educational discount, and they no doublt got a substantial volume discount

Open bidding

[ahde]

Of course Apple won the bid to provide iBooks and Airport wireless connection points. Its not like Dell or HP can compete with the manufacturer, even if the committee thought that Apple's "level of expertise" in supporting their own products did not exceed those of independent vendors regardless of price.

What I'm saying is, this wasn't an open bid -- for the best hardware or price. A backroom deal was awarded based on a political decision.

You can bet if you see something on every TV show, without fail, it'll be in taught in school before long.

Pointless

[DarkEdgeX]

Redundant, or probably going to be modded as a Troll, but I just don't care--

WHAT IS WITH THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM AND APPLE COMPUTERS?

When I was in high-school, they force-fed this crap into our lives, and it's sad to see a generation later that this attitude persists even to this day. Doesn't anybody in the public school system GET IT? The real world uses PC-based hardware and software, mostly Windows based systems, but I imagine Linux has a bigger share of the market than MacOS does. (It certainly has a lot of mindshare in the public.)

Why public schools don't go out and buy (or assemble!) cheap PC's instead of forking out a fortune for Apple crap is beyond me. Sure, these are laptops, so self-assembly really isn't realistic, but you could buy Celeron-based laptops and make out on the cheap fairly well! (Cruise over to Gateway and check out their low-end Celeron systems, hell, even the mid-range Pentium III systems don't break the $2000 mark if you keep off most of the big spendy features (CD-RW drive, for example).

Very irritating that my tax dollars go to NOT helping kids learn how to use real-world systems and software...

Re:What the hell is with schools and laptops?

[Kymermosst]

Take them home? That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard. Have you SEEN what happens to things when you let kids borrow them overnight? That's why libraries have fines, and if you trash a textbook, you are expected to pay for it.

Let's say a school district does check the laptops out to students... What happens when the kid drops it and smashes the display and trashes the HDD? Since the families you mention can't afford a computer, how do you cover the cost of replacement?

Your first thought had better not be my tax money. I'm okay with supplying computers to schools, but not paying for replacements of said laptops when students destroy them.