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Buy College Education, Get Free iBook
kraksmoka writes ""The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about how Saint Leo University in Florida is offering an iBook laptop to every incoming residential student and full-time faculty member. '... the draw of the iBooks has encouraged some of the more than 1,700 students at the university's main campus who would otherwise commute to live in dormitories, which makes the program a success in the university vice president's eyes.'" The students do not keep the computers, unless they finish two years in the honors program.
and i am convinced that my new iBook 800 with combo drive is the best Mac i've ever owned. It took about 2 days for me to belive that.
(PB 100, Duo 230, 280c, 180c, 520c, 660AV, 7500, G4/450, and TiBook 550 if you really care to know)
It is cheap (as in beer), its fast, its rock solid construction, its got a sexy bright screen, its got very good wireless coverage, its light (in grams), it has every port i could ever want, and its simple in design which doesn't lend itself to breakage of parts (like my work's Thinkpad with now broken USB door and broken PCCard buttons)
so what?
This is a great plan and gives students a great leg up with the ultimate college computer. I wish that i had had the opportunity 12 years ago when i went to college to get a PowerBook 100 (included with tution price).
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Maine has started a program giving iBooks to 7th graders. Their goal is to eventually loan one to EVERY middle school student in the state. I did a quick google search and here's the first article I found.
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
My college began to "give" (part of fees) laptops to all incoming students in 1995, pretty much the first school to do so.
My new laptop was a PII-233 Acer, with a 3.2GB drive and I opted for 64MB of RAM instead of 32MB. It only had a 800x600 screen, but it served me well my four years, and I still use it semi-regularly (though it has 160MB of RAM now). The laptop was ours, though any unauthorized hardware tinkering would void the nice 4-year warranty. During my stay, I had two motherboards, one hard drive, one LCD screen, the upper plastic shell, two LCD front and back bezels, a power supply board, and a power brick replaced.
While the laptop was invaluable for getting work done, it was also a distraction. With a network port at every desk, ICQ became the equivalent of note-passing. Many kids I knew freshman year had to drop out, as they spent the majority of their time playing Starcraft and Quake II, chatting on ICQ and IRC, playing in MUDs, and downloading MP3s. Still, it was pretty useful for emailing professors, getting reports done, and making CEOs jealous in airports.
The major heartache with laptop ownership happened every fall, when the freshmen would get their shiny new laptops, one full year of computing technology later. During the last year, it was getting difficult to run some of the applications needed for class, on outdated hardware. Everyone I knew ended up buying a desktop machine. With the network connection, I could RDP, VNC, or X applications from my desktop to my laptop. This was pretty much necessary when trying to crunch large mathematical problems in MATLAB; *especially* useful when modeling 3D electromagnetic fields. The laptop was also unable to make anyone jealous.
If there was one thing I would change about the laptop program, it would be to update the hardware every two years. A two-year-old laptop would still hold some value for charity or resale, and the upperclassmen would not be held down by inferior hardware during their most intensive classes.
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