Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
...it's a win for Intel!
...when Apple was the ONLY option in US education. What happened? Can it happen again if we all jump on the bandwagon?
Sure it will, it's a closed system.
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?
San Francisco Photographers
neener, neener!
Our plan is working -- GET THE FACTS!
because students won't be able to play any games on them!
(And we all know how much teachers like apples to begin with)
ZOMG! Dell, Send sum mor computars to Europe now!!!11 PC r0x0rz & Mac sux!!!
Sorry, the summary sounded a bit melodramatic...
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
If only they can do that in the US...
"Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash." Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A. Heinlein
By that reasoning, NetBSD or Solaris would be better still :)
James P. Barrett
There are many nice non-3D games to play, like nethack, which, incidentally, runs fine on both NetBSD and Solaris ;-)
That, and there's less potential for confusion:
(i.e.:ONE mouse button!)
It should also be noted that most teachers require the same level of simplicity (as one double-clicks a hyperlink as we speak)
There are no uninteresting things. There are only uninterested people.
Michael Dell wanted Steve Jobs to haave Apple fold their tents and give the money back to their shareholders.
Good call......
dumbass.
There is also this common misconception that, on the global desktop & server PC market, Apple is extremely small compared to Dell. People think that Apple sells 1% or less of the total number of PCs sold by Dell. But this is wrong, Apple has got 1/7th (14%) of Dell market share. Given this perspective, Apple suddenly appears much bigger...
Having 90-something percent market share with their ipod, no other market leader enjoys widespread public support as Apple. How come people aren't "player"-hatin' on Apple?
.. making it impossible for musicians who want to sell DRM'd music that plays on the iPod wihout going through Itunes.
Note: I like Apple etc. still it's fascinating that idiots havent stared hatin' on them.
Wanting drama, I'll even offer up some suggested angles:
1) Napster has a better and cleaner interface than itunes.
2) Ipod's DRM sucks, and they only support their particular DRM
3) You can't easily replace the batteries in the ipod like how you can with digital cameras and cell phones. You must send it away etc.
There is still hope that a new generation will grow up and not accept that computers crash all the time, data gets lost every now and then and for that really important word document, there can't be enough backups because you never know when the machine will just eat it.
Also, they might have much higher expectations for a GUI and point out all the bad stuff about the windos standard we who've grown up with it don't even notice anymore.
When my mother got her first PC, I put Linux on it. For surfing and mail it was perfect. Later on she took one of those "internet course" things. She came back with a strong dislike of "that windows thing" she had to use there. I'm certain anyone whose first exposure to computers was a Mac will have a much stronger opinion.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If anything, putting their computers in an environment like a school to show young people that Macs *do indeed actually crash quite a bit, even under OS X* is a bad idea.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
Is it just a crazy theory of mine that if more people use apple, more games might be made OpenGL, and therefore be easily ported to linux? Like I said, I'm no apple supporter , not by a long shot, I won't ever own anything with that logo on it. But games are really the only thing keeping me in the windows market in the first place. If I could get games to linux, I'd just switch to gentoo and be done with it. Is it simply this limit? Or are there other issues?
What would indeed be ironic is if that did happen on some level, and people loudly complained that M$' new implementation of OpenGL on vista sucked ass and even more people stopped using it.
i have yet to see one single mac in a school or an university. in my old school there were some old hp vectras and in the vocational school there are some more or less modern hps. in the university there were mostly sun workstations.
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
I cannot imagine who would think that this is news. Apple has 15.2% Microsoft has um... 84.8%, oh yes Apple is Nr.1 in education. Seems to me like the writer needs an education in maths.
If Apple gains 80% or whatever market share, intel will be dependent on Apple not suddenly switching to AMD. Although it would be hard for a 90% market owner to switch overnight .. once they make an announcement that they'll be weaning off .. intel shares will drop. This what happened to some of iPod's component manufacturers. More stable for them to have more diversity in the market.
This is a true and insightful comment and exactly the situation at my school too. My guess: it's because the default mouse settings for macs absolutely suck. I'll jump on a PC over a Mac in the lab too, because even though the Mac is a superior computer, the PC has a much more sensitive mouse that can right click, middle click, and scroll. The Mac mouse is sluggish and a pain in the ass to do alternative clicking/scrolling. I know this can be easily replaced and changed, of course, but it's too much of a pain in the ass to have to do this every time you just randomly sit down at a public machine, so most people (myself included) avoid the problem entirely.
Mac fanboys are pathetic. Neither the parent nor grandparent posts were trolls, neither disparaged macs unfairly, they both just said they are underused in computer labs. If anything, the parent post complimented macs, just said that the default mouse settings suck (which they do).
Sheesh. Moderators, get a life and/or a brain.
Microsoft started making computers? Why haven't you submitted this story to /. yet?? That's major news!
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
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...
:) A big part of the education is to think outside the box, avoid bureaucracy, turn crazy ideas into reality and revolutionize the world. :)
.doc is a banned file format. :)
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."
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
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
I tired of trying to get ACPI to suspend to ram on Linux; after two years of unfruitful attempts I gave in and got a powerbook; it suspends & resumes as it should and the software is not so bad :-)
The story is missing quite a bit of substantial information, which I'll post here:
Hewlett Packard at 14.2 percent, Acer at 9.5 percent, Fujitsu at 7.8 percent, and the remaining PC vendors taking 38.6 percent. Dell is still outcompeting Apple in the US, where Apple reportedly garners 22-23 percent of the education market share. Macworld UK reports that Apple's biggest European success is in Switzerland, where Apple holds 54.4 percent of the market-- Apple also ranks number one in France with 19.5 percent, Sweden with 15.2 percent, and takes second in Germany with 15.6 percent.
If anything, putting their computers in an environment like a school to show young people that Macs *do indeed actually crash quite a bit, even under OS X* is a bad idea.
I own 4 macs: a 15" Powerbook, a 12" iBook, a dual 2.5 GHz G5, and a 1 GHz G4 (MDD). These 4 machines are up and running 24/7. Two of them are servers exposed to the Internet. One of those servers also runs Final Cut Pro, email, etc.
I can count on one hand how many times these machines have crashed since 2002 (three times). Applications do occasionally lock up but can always be force quit.
If your macs are running OS X and the hardware is not faulty, your Macs are not going to be crashing. Since 50% Mac share at your school suggests more than a few Macs, my intuition is that you're making this up or that the users at your school don't know what a crashing Mac looks like. In other words, I think either you're lying or you have no idea what you are talking about.
Do you have any details about these crashes?
blog
It's about time Apple made some inroads to take the market back from Dell.
Take it from me, they find games to play. Last generation Imacs came with some cool, 3D marble game and a chess game. Never mind that they still find ways to waste time with Itunes, even when its not connected to the internet...They have also found games that run locally and do not need an admin password to install.
The reason this is bad news for education in Europe, particularly Switzerland and France, is that Apple is a lock in company. Buy the hardware and you are stuck. You can't move the OS to another hardware vendor, and with the MacIntels, you can't boot any other OS on the hardware. This is not something any sane person would want for public sector institutions in his country. MS is bad enough. But at least you can run the hardware of your choice and get it wherever you want.
Its a moral issue, and its a political issue, its about personal freedom, and its the exact same debate as is happening in Massachusets, but on a different subject. Some companies, and Apple is one, want to lock their customers in. The customers should not go for it.
What Apple wants is, you buy the hardware, it only runs OSX. Then you buy an iPod, it will only play stuff bought at the Mac store. Then you can only buy at the Mac store if you do it using some Mac application....
Its gross. Its not what Apple, the Apple of Hypercard and the early days, was about. But its what they are about now, and the Swiss need to wake up and realise that MS + Acer or Dell or whoever may not be the greatest, but its a lot better than this.
That's a nice troll you got goin' on there. While it's not proof positive, that you are associated with Pyroenvy, an outfit that publishes web pages like this really lowers any claim to a clue you might have.
The reason this is bad news for education in Europe, particularly Switzerland and France
We are doing just fine here, thank you very much.
You can play whatever you want on the iPod.
Mac OS X is *nix. There is a good implemetation of X11 out of the box. You get Perl, Python, Apache, MySQL, etc. out of the box (no need to install Cygwin). With the native GUI applications you get, again out of the box, you can do pretty much anything you want. I can't think of a better system for Education.
On a Mac you can still install Linux, as in the past. On the intel Macs, there is a good change you will be able to install Windows too, which was not possible in the Hypercard days you cherish so much.
Why do you want to have a range of mediocre choices when you can have one good system?
I don't see Switzerland being turned into a Stalinist dictatorship by Apple any time soon.