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

Educational discounts aren't much of a discount

[jkitchel]

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?

Re:Educational discounts aren't much of a discount

[Graymalkin]

While $699 may indeed be more money than $500 up front, that doesn't really address the price issue as a whole. When you buy as an institution you have to gauge the system's TCO, not merely the up front cost.

I've seen a number of PC computer labs in the past couple years, Gateways, Dells, and HPs have been most prevelent. In most of the labs I'd say a good 5% of the machines were down at any given time from hardware failure. Each of those failures required one of the lab adminstrators to at the very least diagnose if not fix. A suprising number of times I've seen entire computer labs entirely screwed over by the latest Windows VotW (Virus of the Week).

The several Mac labs I've either administered or have seen have been run by fewer admins and have seen far less downtime. Both OS9 and 10 are relatively simple to manage, even in a large lab environment. OSX works very well with Windows and Unix network shares meaning no third party software to provide such support. OSX Server is very well priced per client than Windows Server 2003 or 2000 Server. The OSX Server can also provide services for Linux, Unix, and Windows systems as well as Macs.

Each down system or per seat cost of a supporting server OS raises the TCO of any purchase. The adminstration costs of a Windows lab will quickly raise the price of the lab over that of an equivilent Mac lab. Say you've got a district with a need for 1000 computers. Admins say are running $50k a year. Per hundred computers you need two MCSEs. Per three hundred eMacs you might only need two admins.

The first year your eMac lab will cost the district $799,000 just in administration and upfront purchasing. The PC lab will cost you $800,000 or so. By virtue of the PCs just needing more care you've eliminated any price advantage they had in the first year. Subsequent years the problem is exacerbated even more, the PC admins are going to suck down $300k a year. The Mac admins only $100k. Over five years the PCs are going to suck two million dollars out of the district coffers. The Macs will cost the district eight hundred thousand dollars less than the PCs despite the higher up front price.

Any institution looking only at the initial system price for computers is foolish and should be removed from their position promptly.

Re:operating under flawed assumptions

[bedouin]

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.

there's more to it

[b17bmbr]

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.

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

[multiOSfreak]

My Mac essentially has two choices OSX or Linux from Yellow Dog.

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).