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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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I'll be immediately moderated down for this, but doesn't this sound exactly like Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer with Windows?
The only difference is they are going for greater market share twenty years from now by influencting the younger generation, while Microsoft was going for domination right away.
Note to moderators: This is not redundant. I was the first one to post it.
Are they just giving away the upgrade or the entire package? If it's the whole OS that's a pretty good deal... heck I'm betting it will sway a lot of people who are thinking of buying a new PC into buying a Mac.
How long till we see the switch ads saying "I got my Mac OS for free... Apple is so nice and 1337"
I got WinXP, Frontpage, OfficeXP, and Visual Studio from MS for being a college student, why didn't we hear about this?
It's great to see that Apple is still promoting their role in the educational market - that's where I started off with Macs. Learning with them at school, especially with their first experiences with computers, can really help people decide which OS to use in the future. Take Maine, for example, where every 7th and 8th grader gets an iBook. A lot of the concerns about that program have come regarding the teachers' and parents' concern with having to learn the new hardware and software. Glad to see Apple is giving teachers a chance to stay on the front lines of the OS.
my highschool had TONS of apple machines, and we even got more after i left. Not to mention the vocational school i went to after highschool had even more?! macs. i'm sure apple has given schools hardware discounts as well, otherwise they would have never gotten imacs over pcs.
then again, i remember talking to the sysadmin one day only to hear him ranting about the difficulty of administrating nt4 as opposed to the mac machines.
- tristan
The best part of the giveaway is that Apple is finally handing out some training software (for what it's worth -- totally sight unseen) for OS X. Having just dealt with transferring my mother and several friends from the old Mac OS to OS X, I can safely say that some training and support will be _VERY_ welcome.
i went down to my university's computer store and the guy there is a big machead like me. i asked him about getting jaguar, since i'd heard several answers to the question of how much the upgrade would really cost, ranging from free to 20 to 70 to the full 120. he said apple yanked their old committment to higher education faculty of a 1 dollar upgrade forcing the faculty to pay the standard educational price of 70. i wonder if this k-12 thing will extend to the universities at some point.
MS isn't trying to sell hardware? What about the x-box? I think that microsoft is trying to enter the hardware market as a serious competitor. What they don't know is that controlling the hardware market isn't as easy as controlling the software market.e.g. their usual tricks won't apply here.Apple tried to block 3rd party manufacturers and where did that get them. If you have a doubt ask IBM (or sun). IBM wasn't able to control the pc which she had invented in the first place. These companies have learned their lesson and are now moving to the software side of the force. MS is going to have a hard time in the hardware market...
This isn't the worst of it.
Occasionally, I substitute teach, so I don't think I'm qualified for Apple's give-away, so.
But, from what I've seen, the worse of this advertising stuff is the Channel 1 network.
In exchange for free TVs in every room (and the cable infrastructior [sp] along with it), the school agrees to broadcast this news program into the school rooms.
The actual content of the Channnel one network is supposedly news, but it's biased, heavily, but I suppose that it's hard to keep bias out of news. I mean, just by choosing which stories to cover you've got bias.
CNN's Anderson Cooper and MTV's Serena Alschule (however you spell it) got their start at channel one. It also allowed for a lot of schools to have the means to make their own news shows, some of which were basically some kid reading in monotone the events of the day and the sports scores, along with the cheesy Video Toaster graphics.
But they (Channel 1) pay for it by showing about 4 segments of 4 ads in about 15 minutes to a very specific and very captive audience.
But I remember this stuff back when I was in school. I remember that they had thousands of ads that students were forced to watch, mostly involving OXY cleansers and Pepsi.
Vaguely depressing, because they had the demographic they wanted and the kids had to watch, sometimes there were quizzes based on the content of the show. (Of course, depending how the student cared about his/her grade.)
There's your advertising in schools for you.
At least my school had a pepsi and a coke machine, for choice, you know. They turned them off before first hour started, though my experiences show that the availability has little effect on the students themselves in the classroom. It's more likely the location and the towns' economic situation.
To try and push this into vaguely on topic-ness, I haven't seen an Apple (other than a few Apple IIs [even still]) in a school I've taught at or attended since my college's graphic design lab.
Dan
This is ironic, the Gates Foundation gave a $1 million grant to fund the project in Maine... Gates (Bill) gives money to Maine to buy Macs? I just thought that was slightly amusing...
(btw, check the site for refference, it's on the right)
I am a 8th grade student at a Middle School who is running the yearbook team. I am the sole user of a G3 with the 21 inch CRT display. I love the computer for what it is, and I am even gladder now that I can ask my advisor to order Jaguar from that site for me. Right now the G3 is crashing twice a week, and i want to have some more peace of mind, espcially so I do not have to upload the pictures and templates every night. THANK YOU APPL!
"What we have here is a failure to communicate"
The Warden, Cool Hand Luke
The bigger problem is having school districts reponsibly spend the extra money they will save.
That is a huge problem. One of the local schools near where I live just finished spending $12 million to upgrade the sports complex. Astroturf football field, bigger stadium, clay running tracks, etc. The best part is that they've always had a parking problem and they built a bigger stadium where the parking lot used to be and didn't build any more parking. Doh!
I see this move as apple trying to convince those educators who bought an apple under OS9 or OSX / 9 to upgrade so that the students coming out of the schools are tutored in OSX helping to foster the OS.
I do security
In most schools (like the one I am network admin for) admins are terrified of going over their licenses. The threatened software audits by M$ were enough to get a lot of those slacking in line. As to your second point, you are mistaken there also. We are required to use a shitty Windows only DB program by the district office and are still fifty-fifty mac/pc across the school.
My teachers are jumping on this. It may make them committed to leaving OS9 behind. And isn't that really Apple's goal here?
Apple has an interesting pricing system. From the page you linked, we learn that it costs $799 with 128MB, $874 with 256MB and $1024 with 512MB, and for $40 you can "get twice the RAM".
"You must be a K-12 teacher currently employed in a public, private, or charter school to qualify for participation in this program. This offer is limited to eligible K-12 teachers and is not available to resellers, institutions, home schools, non- teacher K-12 school employees, preservice/student teachers, or higher education faculty (including college of education faculty)."
I'm really quite surprised at this snub. Apple has always had a very positive history of supporting homeschoolers, even offering institutional discounts to HS'ers. Until now, I suppose.
Thanks for nothing, Apple.
I'm a high school computer science teacher teaching PASCAL, C++ and Java - using Linux of course. I'd *like* to switch (or at least DEMO) for the kids to see that Unix is now underlying a retail desktop OS. But I've got a room full of Intel PC's. And every Mac you can buy now comes with Jaguar on it already. So I guess I'm wondering, "Whats the Point, Apple?"
Not sure how much this will help Apple. This is one of their biggest markets already and they already lots of special deals already for educators on hardware and software. Maybe they should have gone for colleges as well but I guess the marketing dollars wouldn't stretch that far.
Apple's doing this because there are a lot of iMacs out there that can run OSX 10.2 but were bought before hand. Anyone playing with previous versions of OSX were likely told by their tech specialist (usually media center/Librarian with yet another job to do for the same money) to pass on OSX until Apple got it more usable. Even with copies of 10.2 floating around schools (I do warranty repair at several county's schools) they're not about to go and risk thousands of $$$ for a version of OSX that might not be up to snuff. Hence, the give away.
Apple's not hoping to push hardware sales with this; any new Macs will come with 10.2 on it. They just want people to get away from OS9.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Apple gives away the OS to teachers, thereby strengthening its position in schools and education (post HS is iffy). MS wanted to force schools to buy site licenses, IIRC. Who will win the public's hearts?
It seems that apple has always had a strong connection with schools until I started working at a college. Apple barely offers any deals to colleges. Even if you go for a student discount (and spend about an hour filling out the forms) you'll only get about $50 off a new macintosh (too bad they don't tell you that BEFORE you fill out the forms).
How is apple supposed to expect support from the developer community or the student community when no one is being trained on using macs in school (other then graphics design people)?
The only people I know who know anything about macs are the graphic design people who will probably never own a mac because they will be supplied one from their employer.
Apple should really try and get the techies into macs at school. For example, a local college here offers a 3 year "Computer Systems Technician" Diploma and not once do any of their students touch a macintosh.
Graphic designers won't be developing software for your macs Apple.. clue in.
Actually, Apple has done some very nice things for some local schools around here.
A Georgia middle school that my girlfriend teaches at won a grant from Apple several years ago, which provided the school with 750 iBooks and an airport network to cover the entire campus. Each student and teacher is given an iBook, which all now have OS X, for the school year, unlimited 'filtered' network access at school, and 3 hours of dialup access yer week from of campus. This is in addition to several iMac labs at the school.
This is in an average to low income area as well.
I wish something like this were available to me when I was in middle school.
If Apple want to increase product awareness for OSX (which is a really nice OS, IMHO) they should allow students a really cheap price on Mac software or allow students to obtain free educational copies of their OS and other products.
This will reduce piracy, and keep up with the Evil Empire's (Micro$oft's ) MSDNAA scheme which is allowing departments to sign up for $799 and allows students to burn isos of Microsoft OS's, Visio and developer toolkits.
Also a decent priced upgrade would be better, even Micro$oft offer an upgrade from older OS's more cheaply than a full version!
Also on a minor rant, sorry but the price apple charges is prohibitively expensive at the moment, many of my class mates have looked at my iBook and said they'd love to have one but they really can't afford the £1500ish it'd cost to get one that had comparitive features of a similar PC laptop (eg. Toshiba laptops).
Yes, I know the design is really nice but is it worth another £500-£600?
Also Mac software is so much more expensive, for example, I went to get McAfee Antivirus the other day, PC version = £24.99, Mac version = £70ish.
Although I have to applaud certain members of the games industry for fair pricing, most notably ID software for releasing the excellent Quake 3 Gold edition in a dual format Mac/PC cd and Warcraft 3 made by Blizzard is also released with Mac Executables.
Just my 2 pence on the subject, I love my Mac and I want to but I also love not being in Debt, please listen Apple!