Apple Surpasses Dell in EU Education Market

wackymacs writes "According to a report from Macworld UK, Apple has confirmed it has taken the number one spot in the Western European education market. The company's education market share in the region is now 15.2 percent, placing Dell, with 14.7 percent, to second place. Gartner analyst Isabelle Durand confirmed: 'During the fourth quarter 2005, Apple became the number one PC vendor in the Western European Education market. The company has continued to grow very strongly (+22.4 per cent) and achieved a 15.2 per cent of market share in Q4 2005.'"

Comments

Smart move for Apple

[alex_guy_CA]

If I were an OS maker thinking of the future, I would want as many school kids to work on my computers as possible. People stick with what they are used to, so if a kid works with Mac's in school, what are they going to get when they go to college, or when they buy a house. Has anyone seen any data on lifetime loyalty or stickiness for operating systems?

Re:Macs on Campus

[hattig]

Still, Apple has come a long way since 10 years ago.

I remember the Macs at school then. They really did suck. A lot. Looked nicer than the PCs though, but the OS and the keyboard and the mouse did suck.

Since then, the OS has overtaken Windows substantially, Windows gets reamed by viruses and spyware too easily, and Apple's hardware still looks nicer. 'Macs suck' is just a silly teenage opinion now, rather than being based upon any real fact. Still, the UK Macs still have the @ and " swapped from the usual Windows arrangement, and don't have a # on the keyboard! God knows why! They have that funny S thing, it has its own key!

However people use what they're used to, they're scared to change, they're sheep. It doesn't have the comforting blue E of vulnerability, I mean, Internet on it.

Got an iBook G4 here :)

[Per Wigren]

I just started studying at N3P in Stockholm/Sweden, which is a ~2 year (90 weeks) full time education in "Open Source entrepreneurship". It includes everything from project management to starting your own company to "IT" and basic system administration. Everything has a focus on Open Source, primary on the server side but also on the desktop application side. We have courses on Open Source licenses, software, philosophy etc. "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" is in the list of course material...

Basically they thought that there are too many smart people out there with great ideas and lots of self-learnt knowledge but who are stuck in the system. "Let's make nerds into company owners."

I really like this education. Rule #1 is "Don't follow the rules." :) A big part of the education is to think outside the box, avoid bureaucracy, turn crazy ideas into reality and revolutionize the world. :)

Anyway, sorry for the rant. To get to the point: When we started, everyone got an iBook to use for the course. They chose to go with Mac because it has really low support costs for them ("it just works"), and it's based on UNIX so we can run and test most Open Source applications locally without hassle (through Fink or DarwinPorts). They explicitly state that we are free to format it and install Linux or BSD though, no courses rely on Mac-specific software.

Oh, and .doc is a banned file format. :)

Re:Macs on Campus

[Kadin2048]

Huh, that's odd. When I was at university last, not that long ago, there was about a 60/40 Windows/Mac split, and in the public computer labs you could NEVER get a Mac. Unless you had the misfortune to be there at around 0400 on a Tuesday or something, they were always taken.

The only problem I ever really saw with them was that they tended to have every application on them always running in the background, because Windows users never seemed to understand that Quitting an application from the menu is different from just closing the current document. If somebody did that to Photoshop, Word, Internet Explorer, and a few other things, they'd start to run out of memory and choke.

I never looked too hard, but I'm told that they were all netbooted off of a central server, and the hard drives were frequently re-imaged and contained nothing but the applications and a backup system (so they could boot if the network was down, I suppose). I thought it was a great system.

I guess which one people prefer probably depends a lot on which computers are best maintained, and that probably depends which OS the admins are most comfortable and devote the most attention and resources to. Perhaps we were just lucky to have Mac-friendly admins who knew what they were doing.