Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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