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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.""
I've worked in an educational setting this whole summer and I can vouch for the administrators' (both educational and technical) point of view. Now throw in another point briefly mentioned in the article:
Gee, a $100-$150 (at most) educational discount on a $1700 IMac (~$1600 total) or a $500 Dell?
Granted, that's not entirely comparing apples to apples (pun intended purely as an afterthought), but that's how most educators, teachers, and students will see it. What would you want to work on or buy if you were a cash strapped student?
you can not surf the internet with lcIIIs, much less do . . .
Yes you can, actually. Up until a few years ago a 68k Mac could handle basic internet tasks quite well.
i am a school teacher. my district is probably like many. our IT staff are morons. we don't/can't pay industry standards, so we get the bottom. plus, the jobs are secure, so we can't get rid of idiots. anyways...
a little story. a year or so back, district tech at my school brags about coming back from some microsoft conference, (mind you we are a novell network) and he's got freebies galore. XP pro ( no reg key copies), VS.NET, 2K server, office XP (no reg key), and other crap. thrown out like halloween candy. you think they're gonna cut off their source.
another story. 3-4 years ago, we were finishing the wiring at my school. so, the district tech head is there, yada yada. so i ask her about the servers, since we didn't even have a local file server for our one lab, (and I had lots of student work get lost), and she says the district goal is to consolidate on get this, "fewer, more powerful, servers". this at the time that when the industry was moving the opposite direction. and then she retires, and we're half way there, and there is just too much momentum to change. so we go ahead, and have a crappy, unscalable network, and we have win98 clients rather than 2k, because of a multitude of piss poor decisions, we have no money to spend on memory upgrades.
these people have the ears of the PHB's. and let's face it, if it needs 20 admins where another solution would need 10, and their input makes the call, what do you think they're gonna choose.
for those of you who don't quite understand school spending/funding, let me explain. every year, principals have an end of year "wish list", if there is money left over. why? if they don't spend it, they get less next year. so, saving money is specifically NOT DESIRED. in fact, deficits are preferred. don't ever expect linux to make it in this environment. i could go on. get the ear of your school boards. or vote their asses out.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Anyone who uses MacOS X (Darwin).
Anyone who is interested in real security (OpenBSD).
Yahoo (FreeBSD).
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
As is always the case really.. I work for a college, and our ratio of macs to PC's is probably 1 mac for every 150 PeeCee's. And its a case of a viscious circle - no one on the tech team really knows much about them as the college hardly buys any of them... and the college doesn't really want to buy them as hardly anyone knows about how to support them on our team.
Its frustrating for me as I always try and push alternatives - refurbed cheap (but still hugely powerful) SGI's for CAD work, Linux in many situations, etc - but its always the same old story. Some excuse to get out of it and buy Intel boxes.
From a techie point of view it makes the job easier, but I enjoy getting little diversity in the job - it makes it more of a challenge, and it forces the people I work with to learn new things. Most of them find it amusing to chastise Linux even though it is the backbone of the network - the proxy everyone is routed through, the DHCP address provider, and the DNS servers for every machine.
I think the most overriding factor is money.. MacOSX itself is cheap, and if you could buy it for x86 machines, i'd buy it myself in a second - but the Apple hardware just costs too much, when you consider we were able to get Dell workstations with P4 2.4GHz, 256MB DDR RAM, 15" TFT monitors, and about 30GB harddrives for around $800. Apple can compete by providing machines at that price I am sure, but as OSX really does need a bit more horsepower to get the best out of it, then you really need to spend more to beef it up. How do you justify that to your Wintel loving mansgers with tight purse-strings...?
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Apple as the sole platform in a school will require a superintendent who uses a carrot or stick or both to push Apple there. I know at our college there were too many who were used to their Outlook and MS Office and the general GUI too much to accept learning a new platform. Many software that were bought.. accounting, payroll etc all ran on win32 only.
Switching to entirely an Apple solution quickly would be too expensive. That would mean liquidating a great number of new x86 hardware and software. To be efficient, they need to balance the use of Apple and wintel machines, while planning for a singular platform by buying as many new Apple machines as possible, and the same for software. I've seen a great number of office and institutional software available for Sun workstations, surely running more reliably and at a less cost.
The administration of a school generally listens to their tech departments, and it is always up to the tech department to suggest whatever is in the best interest of the school. They are not doing their job when they push for an all-win32 solution in an attempt to avoid maintenance of platforms they dont understand, and in the long run they get stung.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Any Mac under 2 years old with 256MB of RAM can run Virtual PC under MacOS X. And any native G3 or G4 with a CD-ROM and 192MB of RAM can run Virtual PC under MacOS 9. (And I'm talking Virtual PC 6, of course - latest and greatest.)
That means the schools can have their "single platform" in terms of hardware support -- yet also have diversity. OS X? Check -- and of course, you can run Office:X on it, if you want your students to learn to be mice, er, MOUSes. OS 9? Just start Classic. DOS? It's in Virtual PC. Any Windows version you like? Virtual PC. Linux? Probably Virtual PC - or if you just want to run apps, a lot of them are available through Fink. X Window apps? X11's already available for Jaguar, and I've heard it'll be built into Panther.
Schools aren't the only places that want a single platform. Scientific users have glommed onto OS X Macs because they can run "UNIX apps," Mac stuff and "Windows apps" on a single machine. It frees up desk space, and while a Mac may not be cheaper than a Windows PC, it's most certainly cheaper than a Mac plus a Windows PC plus a UNIX or Linux box.
Yeah, it'll get a little slow if they try to run it all at once on a G3, but oh well, don't do that, then. Unless you're going to do a screen capture of it. :)
"This powerbook was running os9 and we found that we couldnt join a domain and let it run normally like any other wintel machines"
Thats such a Windows POV...this is like saying I Can't Find Any AntiVirus Software for Macs...mainly because you don't need it.
Ok, you want to connect one OS to another's proprietary services. You can either, A) Install Mac Services on your servers -- takes 3 minutes and a reboot (everything takes a reboot on NT)...or B) Go To Microsoft and download the Windows File Sharing software stuff for the Mac -- I forget the name but its located on the Mactopia site Microsoft runs. Its again a 3 minute procedure and will allow you not to screw with your servers.
Past that, if you want single login domain, you will need to upgrade to 2K Servers, set up ADS and make sure its using LDAP instead of the regular BS -- you will need to do this if you are wanting to use any sort of single domain login stuff with mixed OSes because it really wants to revert back to proprietary Windows BS with the focus on Only Windows Works Here.
The problem I find most techs have with Macs are the same thing I see they have with Linux and other 'minor' OSes...they are dumbasses that have only ever had to deal with one OS their entire life discarding every other machine out there. Instead of learning how to use an operating system, they learn how to use Windows by rote. Well you ALWAYS do blah by blahing it. No sense of learning how to do something or figuring it out on their own. Problem solving is not something that most PC / Windows users are good at.
Justify that presumption, I dare you!
Will Microsoft be in business when by 13yod hits the workforce in 5 years? Probably. But how about my 4yos, in 14 years? Maybe, maybe not - but the office tools will be completely different. His older sister won't have hit 30 yet, and the stuff she was taught in school will already be totally obselete.
Teaching kids to use a single toolset (and this applies outside the computing arena too) by rote is stupid, stupid, stupid. Teach them how to find out by themselves for themselves, exemplify it by teaching them with at least three different toolsets.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I've read some of the comments, and most people don't seem to get it. 99% of kids don't WANT to learn C, C++, terminal usage, etc... To most of the kids in school, computer = WINDOWS. They've heard of Mac, maybe Linux, but they don't care. And for the most part, windows is what will be used in whatever their future job is. The small portion of people who want to use linux will use it at home, and have no problems switching to windows at school.
At my school (high school), there are a kabillion windows machines. The newspaper area uses macs, but other than that, it's all windows. People know how to use it. Computers are almost like cars these days. You don't have to know how an engine works to drive a car. Most peole don't want to know how the engine works, they just know "there's the steering wheel, the brake's on the left, gas is on the right, and the shifter is somewhere". Like it or not, Windows is by far the most dominant operating system on desktops today, and that isn't likely to change. People don't care what OS is on their computer, and they'll take whatever the manufactor gives them.
Heh? Actually, your Mac (if you still owned it) has more than just two choices. In addition to OS X and Yellow Dog Linux, you can also choose from GNU-Darwin, NetBSD, various linux distros (including Gentoo, LinuxPPC, Debian, and Mandrake) and let's not forget good old MacOS 9 and older versions. On top of that, you can run (basically) any X86-based OS via Virtual PC.
Limited? Only by how much you know (or don't know, in this case).
Transistors and Beer!!
See I as have my other techs, have always felt Apple was the absolute BEST platform for elementary school students. The abuse those machines get (three CD's in one drive, Juice box gunk in the keyboard) and yet on adverage we lose maybe 2 or 3 iMacs a year (all bondi blues surprisingly, I have only lost one slot load to an actual motherboard getting fried, although I have had to replace 5 or 10 cd-rom drives, my favorite, no you cant put your ham in the CD-Rom, no I do not kid!!!)
For a long time we we where a tri-platform school, Windows in the high school and with the secretaries, macs in the middle school and elemetary school (with a few in the highschool for video and graphics courses.) and two machines running linux for a management software called SAMS.
In comes our new tech adviser to help us expand everything, what does he do, tries to get rid of all 2500 iMacs we have and buy computers from Dell, to supliment our 250 PC's. Yes thats right trash BRAND NEW computers in some cases just to make everything two platform (he tried to trash the linux boxes but was hit with a block when we showed him SAMS only works good on linux)
Its not IT people who make these desicions, its administators, some of whom have never taught in a classroom (this guy doesnt even have a degree in education) who make stupid decision without asking "why are you running things like that?"
After seeing that we only had one part time IT member for the Mac's though and 3 full time and 3 part time staff members for the PC's( in all fareness we all do all three platforms but we have specializations I the mac guy, and everyone else specialized in some perticular way with a part of the OS or network admin), the board of education made him back down or risk getting his contracts ripped up, and as it is after its up he is probably not comming back, but still this is the situation you run into, and IT staff sometimes gets little more say than yes sir no sir.
Heck even when I suggested getting eMacs cause they where cheaper (we could buy more software or equipment for the teachers, or dare I say TRAINNING since they where using OS X instead of 9) I was turned down cause they wanted the fancy iMacs that my assistant super. had. Forget I ever try to save them money again!!!
Itrs annoying, but you just have to play the system.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
The problem that I see with home schooling is that done wrongly, it doesn't prepare the kids to deal with different people.
I mean I did go to public school and I had to deal with smart kids, stupid kids, social kids, anti-social and outright aggressive kids, kids from rich families and kids from welfare families. Exactly like it will be in the real world.
As a homeschooling parent I have to disagree on two counts. 1) While there is a lot of diversity among the students in a public school classroom I never saw much evidence that the kids learned to deal *in a healthy way* with those that were different from them. Just go into (or think back to) a junior high classroom, all the bullying, cliques, hostility between different groups. Sure some kids learned to bridge the gaps or to accept those that were different but it is the exception rather than the rule and often being friendly to the "wrong" kid could put your own position with you peers at risk. I hesitate to say it but I suspect those kids most able to trancend the petty differences that divide school kids were those that had the kind of healthy relationships with their parents that homeschoolers tend to have. I hate to say it but rather than a nirvana of healthy diversity public schools often seem to have more in common with Lord of the Flies
2) Another aspect of public school classrooms is the extreme degree of segregation by age. All your friends (and enemies, and those to whom you are merely indifferent) are ALL your age. All your interaction is with kids the same age, your teachers are generally distant authority figures, even kids relationships with their parents becomes increasingly alienated. These kids are intensely peer dependant. Who cares what my parents or teachers think? Who cares what *I* think? What really matters is what my little clique thinks, to loose their approval is to suffer tragedy. (all of which is feeding into my first point)
Homeschooled kids tend to be dealing with siblings of different ages and friends of different ages as well as dealing with adults (their parents and friends parents). And the parents (who presumably are more mature in their own socialization) are more actively guiding the childrens socialization in healthy ways. I don't know any homeschooling parent that would tolerate the kind of nastiness that is wearily tolerated or not even noticed by the teachers in your typical Jr. High. Even when it reaches a level or is done in plain sight where a teacher must act since the children are so peer dependant the poor opinion and disciplinary actions of the teacher for beating up the funny looking kid is insignificant next to the approval of your peers egging you on.
In my experience homeschooled kids are far better socialized & capable of dealing with peoples differences than their public school peers. As an adult I have never experienced the kind of sullen or insecure silence from a teenager that I commonly experience from public school kids. The homeschooled kids are perfectly comfortable interacting with an adult. Most public school kids are completely out of their element having to deal with someone like myself that is 15 years older. Sure there are homeschooled kids and families that really do poorly interacting with others but I doubt those same kids would do any better in a public school and I suspect they would do a great deal worse since their initial social failings would be compounded by the harrassment of their immature peers.