Apple's School Days are Numbered

prostoalex writes "Business Week describes the current situation in the educational market, suggesting that Apple will lose its share among the high school teachers and students. The worst enemies, according to Business Week, are school superintendents. "We want a single platform," one of them said. "We're trying to get there using the carrot, or blackmail, or rewards, or whatever you call it.""

Comments

Re:Hmm

[scrod]

its not exactly dominant in the home or business world, why teach kids on it?

If your kids can't figure out how to use a different operating system because its widgets are on the right side of the window, then they're pretty fucking stupid.

Re:Uniformity is for the ignorant

[Anonymous Coward]

For this reason I would encourage schools to look for less uniformity not more. Mac, UNIX, Linux, Windows, Be, even VMS, it's all good and the diversity helps stem the tide of malware. Whatever happened to the network being the computer? The client shouldn't matter, mix 'em up and we'll have more rounded students entering the workforce.

Nah, they'll be too busy fighting over who gets to use the VAXen.

Re:Hmm

[advocate_one]

If you want to really confuse an ms-windows user... drag their taskbar up to the top of the window... :)

A fair percentage (like most of them) don't even know you can do little things like that. And if you really really want to be nasty... drag the top edge of the task bar so as to turn it into one that's only a few pixels thick as well...

Re:real reason

[AvantLegion]

Hell, the records server's Administrator password is the initials of the school!

What school is this?

*concocts a plan to get failing students to help fund a G5 tower purchase*

Re:The Mac advantage

[EvilTwinSkippy]

I started at Drexel when they were and All-mac school. 1994, the Power Mac just came out, I had one of the first models. 2 years later Drexel suddenly announced that we were all going PC. Of course all of the courseware on campus was Macintosh. All of the network infrastructure was Macintosh. All of the students were still paying the credit card bills from the purchase of their machintosh.

They ditched their working mainframe software that handled billing and scheduling for an NT based system. I'll be kind, there were problems. No fuck that, the system was braindead. By 2000 the system was still screwing things up.

At some point in this giant clown circus one of their computer systems sent back one of my federal loans. A $6000 balance balooned to $10,000. After spending 2 years camped out at the billing office to straighten the matter out, I still couldn't enroll for non-payment, nor get a loan because I wasn't enrolled. I finally had to take a personal loan, which I needed to start paying back immediately, at which point I said fsck it and got a real job.

School Superintendents say "We want a..."

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Virus-vulnerable monoculture network!". "It's really quite simple you see, there is no other way to guarantee that the virus of the week, coded by some filipino script kiddy, can shutdown every single computer on our network" says J.D. Umbass, superintendent of Jefferson County School System, Pennsylvania. "Besides, if kids every growing up having an alternative perspective on computer technology, they may accidentally understand it." "And it can't be overstated, just how much we save yearly, by being able to hire idiots that only know how to say 'Reboot the computer and see if that fixes your problem'", J.D. Umbass.

"Most important to remember though, is that we don't really teach the children anything other than how to be the secretary or register monkeys of tomorrow, earning minimum wage, and never quite enough to own the likes of the beautiful machines in our computer lab. So what does it matter, if they only get to experience the most ill-designed OS ever concieved, that's what Microsoft is extorting every PC and POS manufacturer into using." said J.D. Umbass.

Re:But PC's are not mono-culture...

[MacGod]

OK, fighting your fire with fire:\

On a Mac, I have:

• Mac OS X (who knew?)
• BSD via Darwin or OpenBSD if you prefer.
• Linux (Suse, Mandrake, Yellow Dog and probably more that I've missed).
• BeOS for PowerPC
• And, of course, good old Virtual PC which, despite being now owned by Microsoft is still a great product, and allows you to run *any* x86-compatible OS on your Mac. And since most of the other OSs you mentioned (OS/2, AtheOS etc) are either old or low-resource, there will be negligible speed hit

In fact, I would go so far as to say that the Mac is the most-compatible platform out there. Personally, I have six different OSs on my Mac right now (Mac OS X, Mac OS 9.1, 9.2.2, Mandrake Linux, Win98 SE and PC-DOS). And that's not even breaking a sweat.