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Jaguar Free for K-12 Teachers
Hugh writes "It seems Apple is giving away for free its newest revision of Mac OS X, version 10.2 (Jaguar), to every K-12 teacher in the U.S."
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Apple doesn't have forty billion in the bank. And MS isn't trying to sell hardware in addition to software.
~Idarubicin
There's some information at the Apple page for the project and at the MLTI site (Maine Learning Technology Initiative). I believe there are about 34,000 laptops at a cost of $34,000,000 (that's from memory).
*Mac OS X v10.2 system requirements:
A minimum of 128MB of memory and one of the following Apple products: Power Mac G3 or G4, iMac, eMac, iBook, and PowerBook G3 or G4. (The original PowerBook G3 and processor upgrade cards are not supported.)
Note that a previous version of Mac OS X is not listed, so it must be the full package. Woohoo!
Blue skies, Barthy Burgers, girls...
I did this for my mom about 10 minutes after Apple made the announcement. I felt authorized, given that I'm her sysadmin.
h ers/i ndex2.html
/.?
Go to:
http://www.apple.com/education/macosxforteac
fill in the zip code of the school of your favorite teacher, and then enter their name and email. OSX will be sent to them. Takes 90 seconds.
P.S. This was announced days ago. What took it so long to make
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
I would think that even teachers would be able to afford $800 for a low end Mac at home, but Apple has been giving Macs to schools for free for years.
A legparnasom tele van angolnaval.
I do not think you got WinXP and extras for free. Your school likely paid a very significant licensing fee for the right to distrubute the software to all faculty, staff, and students. This fee was in turn paid by you through fees, and, if a public institution, through public taxes. I would say you got an incredible deal, but it was far from free.
Or, as has been mentioned here before, the school was forced to license the software for everyone to avoid the dreaded BSA audit.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Even more politically incorrect than that observation will be this question: I don't suppose Jobs will be interested in the millions upon millions of American parents who have taken to home schooling their children - or will he?
I believe Apple has a program that gives discounts to homeschoolers... The same discount they give to teachers. So if you're in the market for Apple hardware, homeschool your kids for a couple months :).
<Amanda`> I just went out to the parking lot in my bathrobe to exchange warez CDs.
The eMacs offer Firewire, USB, ethernet, a 17" flat screen monitor, nice speakers, a compact form factor, and they are very durable. Sure if you buy some no-name, do-it-yourself pc you can get a computer cheaper, but these prices are pretty good for a pre-built, quality machine. On top of all of this you get MacOS X, tons of great free software such as iTunes and iMovie, and the ability to run almost any software written for Linux or other Unix-like operating systems. Not a bad deal at all.
Sapere aude!
OS X runs fine on G3-based machines, even some
of the older ones. Sometimes you have to add
memory though.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
G3's and OS X is a pretty bad mix... It's like windows 98 of a pentium 100 mhz machine...
Hardly.
I've been running Mac OS X since beta on my six year old Beige G3/300 which has 256MB RAM and was running off the original ixMicro 3D video card. Once I hit 10.1.5 things ran quite smoothly, although things will slow down if I'm playing MP3s over NFS. (My 10/100 NIC and SCSI hard disk are both sitting on the PCI bus, along with the video card.) I was able to run dual monitors one off the Rage II and the other off the ixMicro just fine.
I recently upgraded to a RADEON 7000 PCI so I get better dual monitor support and can play some 3D games at low resolution.
This is my primary workstation and I am often running ~10 applications including Photoshop, OmniWeb, iChat, Mail, iCal, iTunes, BBEdit, XFree86, Terminal, etc. Things work wonderfully.
Don't be an idiot. You can use your Crucial RAM
and generic LCD screen with a Mac. I just bought
256 MB of RAM for an old iMac for the princely
sum of $42 -- from Crucial.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
That's twice as good in most categories compared to the Imac (right down the number of mouse buttons).
[Insert standard "Mhz Myth" argument here]
[Insert standard "One Button Like God Intended" rant here]
Also, you forgot to factor in the labor involved in building and troubleshooting the computer. Most teachers would have to hire somebody to do this. Since this is a one-off build (I know if you're making dozens of the same computer you can do it faster, since you only need to troubleshoot once), assume four hours at $25/hour to build and troubleshoot. Since most teachers add Windows XP Home for $186.99, and Office XP Standard for $416.99, and you're looking at a total of $1,508.96 for your system.
Anyway, you're missing my point. My point is not that low end Macs are a better deal than low end PCs (they probably aren't). My point is that there are low end Macs which are affordable on a teacher's salary.
A legparnasom tele van angolnaval.
OS X "Jaguwire" requires a 3d video card with T&L engine (ie, Nvidia geforce1 or ATI radeon +)
Then how come I'm writing this on 10.2 with an ATI 128?
According to the MSDN-AA faq:
Do students need to uninstall the software at the end of the course?
No, students are allowed to keep the software they have installed, but they may not check out or download additional MSDNAA software unless they continue taking courses from a member department. Regardless, they are still bound by the terms of the MSDNAA license agreement.
Are you sure it's not a good deal? Have you looked it up?
.NET Enterprise Servers: Windows servers, SQL Server, Exchange Server, Commerce Server, BizTalk Server, Host Integration Server, Systems Management Server, Sharepoint Portal Server, and several others
"The membership will run from July through June each year and will cost $799 (USD) per department per year to join. The program was designed to run concurrently with the standard academic year."
List of software:
* Visual Studio Professional
* Microsoft Project Professional
* Windows XP, Windows 2000, and other Microsoft operating systems
*
* Microsoft Visio Professional
* MSDN Library (updated quarterly), documentation, technical articles, and code samples * Software development kits (SDKs), betas, new releases, and updates
* Development tools for Windows CE
* Professional technical support for the program administrator that includes unlimited setup and install support and 4 regular support incidents
* Technical support newsgroups for faculty members
* Regular CD-based software shipments with updated software
MSDNAA FAQ
*Insert joke about how you have to factor in the cost of your soul[d] here*
Try Pinellas County School board/system.They are not exclusively Mac but the main school board building has a lot of them around. Across the county, Macs are in schools in varying degrees. The lowest percentage are in high schools, though there are some high schools that are about 90% Mac. Another high school tech person told me his school had no Macs. He just didn't support them. The teachers in that had them did their own support, except for warranty repair. Then they called us (Apple authorized repair shop).
This county also has a city (Largo, FL) that is run with minimal windows machines. They are primarily Linux with a handfull of Macs in city hall. Wouldn't believe how scared the linux guys are of the Macs. Swore that there was no way to hook them up to the network and ended up getting the Macs their own dsl line. Weird!
I drank what? -- Socrates
Actually, the lowest priced Mac for non-educators is the 15 inch monitor iMac G3 for $799 at Apple's online store. However, I used to work in education, and the discounts available to me were more in line of $50 off a roughly $2000 machine. I can see them selling the eMac with more of a discount though, since that line was initially targeted only to the education market.
Here's the price for a classic iMac for K-12 educator personal purchase.
Snow
256MB SDRAM - 1 DIMM
Keyboard/Mac OS X - U.S. English
iMac 600MHz
40GB Ultra ATA drive
CD-ROM drive
Mac OS X and Mac OS 9
Harman Kardon speakers
Apple Pro Keyboard
Apple Pro Mouse
Subtotal $789.00
All new Macs come with OSX 10.2. The free offer of 10.2 to K-12 teachers is to enable them to install it on the Macs they already have (both school and personal), not push new hardware sales. Think about it before entering bash-Apple mode.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Who gives a rat's rear end about iPhoto, iMovie, or iTunes for the education market? What are you wanting these people to do with their machine?
This shows very little imagination. When I was in high school, I digitally created and edited "radio commercials" for a journalism class. This was with my Amiga 2000, and my teacher was amazed by what I had done. My class also made some cheesy movies, which I edited using a series of VCRs and my computer. I could only imagine what I could have done with iMovie - which is considerably easier and produces output in much higher quality than what I had done. There's more to "education" than just reading, writing and arithmetic - it is exposing children to many different things that they might find they love. It's always a bonus when they can have fun learning too.
The idea of the unified addressbook is nothing new. It exists in many forms. LDAP is one of them. A school system can easily supply an LDAP server to all networked machines. If this was a Microsoft shop, Exchange does a great job too. Does addressbook auto discover the email addresses of everyone on the network? Didn't think so.
This is totally flamebait, as well as false. Actually, address book is in fact LDAP compatible. BTW...this is nitpicky, but Exchange doesn't find names and addresses - Active Directory does. Mac OS X has Open Directory, which can do the same thing. But, you can always use LDAP too.
You are quoting prices on an grotesquely underpowered, outdated machine on which OS-X crawls. It doesn't have any way to write to removable media, so how is the teacher supposed to back up her data? "Sorry class, but I lost all of your grades in my spreadsheet because my hard drive died. I had no backup because for $800, my iMac didn't even come with a floppy drive, much less a CD-R/W."
Now compare that price to a modern, low-end machine from, say, Compaq:
Presario 6300US Minitower
128MB RAM
Windows XP Home Edition
Intel Celeron Processor 1.4GHz
48X CD-Rom Drive
40GB Hard Drive
Floppy drive (3..5")
Keyboard
Mouse (with more than one button and a wheel)
CompUSA Price: $400 after rebate
Samsung SyncMaster 750s 17-inch monitor: $140 after rebate
Altec Lansing 220 2.0 Amplified Speaker System: $30
Grand total: $570
And that price is just what the general public can get by walking into CompUSA today. A little shopping or an educators' discount would have turned up an even better price. For $250 less than the outdated "classic" iMac, the teacher gets a much faster machine (a 1.7ghz Celeron will spank a 600mhz G3 according to any respected, independent benchmark such as Spec), a larger monitor, a floppy drive, and more bundled software. In addition, she gets a machine that is much more expandable should she ever wish to put in a better video card, CD-R/W drive, DVD drive, etc.
So please stop with the Apple fanboy routine. The iMac line is grossly overpriced -- especially for most teachers' modest incomes.
The cheapest Wintel Desktop they list is a Compaq EVO D510 2GHz P4 256/40GB CD at 1,149.00. The Compaq has more RAM and a three year warranty but inferior display/graphics combo and no firewire.
They also offer amazing specials on Apple products. When the second generation TiBook came out I got a first generation one for $1,700. I also got an iPod for $230 back when they retailed for $399.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
Rutgers University for one. 30,000 users, covering all three campuses of Newark, New Brunswick, and Camden as well as the 5 sub-colleges that make up RU NB. Its not the main use and its mostly legacy as modern macs can do without it, but it's still there churning away, just as it has for years. How do I know this? I work for RU's Resnet. So cram your whiny BS. Don't wanna read about Apple stuff? It's a simple option in your account.
Viva La Revolucion! Buy a Mac!