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US University Dumps Windows to go All Mac
MacKeyser passed us a link to a MacWorld article about a University doing things a little differently. Instead of sticking with their inefficient mix of Apple and PC systems, the college is doing a 'total technology refresh', and adopting an all-Mac policy on the campus. Previously, a class at Wilkes University would be outfitted with something like 20 Macs and 20 PCs, to allow for individual preferences in software and OS use. With Boot Camp students at the Pennsylvania liberal arts college will be able to switch between Windows and OSX, choosing which applications and OS to use at any given time. "[Scott Byers, vice president for finance and the head of campus IT said] 'We think it will save $150,000 directly, in buying fewer units - even though the Macs cost more per unit than PCs.' The school, which enrolls about 4,000 undergraduate and graduate students, will reduce its inventory from nearly 1,700 computers to around 1,450 after the change over. Other costs savings, however, will be harder to measure. 'By standardizing, the IT department should be more productive,' Byers said."
Wake me up when a major US university does the switch...
... diversity good.
Even it it's a 'non-evil' monoculture.
I may be a Mac fanboy, but I don't see how fewer computers can be a benefit for students.
RTFA.
The classes used to have (all number pulled from my ass) 15 windows PCs & 15 Mac PCs. In a class of 20, 10 would go unused.
Now, they'll have 20 PCs capable of running OS X or Windows. All students still have access to a PC.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
fta:
"Although the $1.4 million three-year switch - which started last year with the purchase of approximately 500 Macs"
$965 per apple? including the installation, planning etc? Over three years, in which time period the current macs would be outdated and require hardware upgrades in order to use the mac OS that will be in circulation by then?
Methinks their budget may fall a tad short..
The price of a store-bought copy of windows is several times the royalty paid for an oem windows install. So it's a net win for microsoft
Um, unless they just use the XP licenses they already have?
Anyway, MS licensing works differently if you're a 2000+ seat university compared to some lone windows fanboy running vista ultimate.... I don't think this is going to be a gain for MS at all.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
No, it's a good thing. The transition from Mac to Linux is much easier since they already lost compatibility, application support, gaming, and driver support anyway.
I've said it before, I've said it again; I bought my first Mac(book) recently, and the thing that pushed me over the edge to do so was the fact I knew I could fall back to Windows when I needed to, or completely stay in Windows if the OS X experience wasn't a good one. But like most people who try it, that "security blanket" of Boot Camp is more of an insurance policy, or peace of mind (or gaming option), rather than something they end up using in real life. I have my MS Office and OpenOffice, Opera/Firefox/Safari, and even IE under Crossover Office or Parallels. (I tend to use Parallels for IE testing purposes of my websites).
:)
The only reason I reboot to windows now, is for the odd game; and even that's rare with me. Windows seems so much peppier, too, when I do go to it; since I only go there occasionally, the system doesn't get bogged down with addons, startup items, spyware, etc.. (The old reinstall-windows-every-six-months can be extended greatly, if you only use Windows occasionally.)
I think for a multimedia course that needs to teach students both Mac and PC skills, it makes all the more sense; both OS's on one machine: of course it's an overall savings, and somewhat of a no-brainer.
Yes, Mac hardware is single-vendor (unless you do the hackbook thing, not viable for a commercial enterprise); but in my experience, it's well designed, solid, stable, fast hardware. My only lament is that I'm a big fan of sub-nootbooks, like Librettos, and Apple has no such option currently. But I can live without that, for all the other benefits that OS X brings.
Yes, I'm a recent fan, and I am a boy, so fling away with your "fanboy" insults. Meanwhile, I'm productive and enjoying the experience immensely
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
But it's not about that; and, as is often the case the slashdot headline is an anti-windows line.
They are standardising on hardware, not an operating system. Which makes sense in terms of cost and hardware management.
often longer. every fw imac, cube, power mac and ibook we ever owned is running tiger and doing better than previous OS versons - every non-fw g3+ is running 10.3.9 and doing very well.
installation? ard.
planning? has to be done anyway.
etc? macs have less etc.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
That's really what it comes down to. I've heard lots of creative justifications, but they are BS when you get down to it. It is just legacy. Back in the day, Mac was it for graphics work. Windows couldn't do it and didn't have the apps in any case. So it was Mac or nothing. Likewise with things like digital audio. When it first started, it was ProTools or nothing, computers weren't powerful enough to do it on their own.
Well, many people don't like change, thus they stick with Macs because that's what they've always used. The other justifications usually come from the fact that they either just tend to listen to the marketing hype, or because they feel a need to try and justify the more expensive purchase.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
The Mac zealotry argument does not really fly in this case. If you read the original article, it says that the IT head of the college was "before the switch was a dyed-in-the-wool Windows user." He clearly states the reasons for switching in terms of cost savings ($150,000). One set of machines will be able to do what previously required two sets of machines. Set up one lab. Boot up in Windows or the Mac OS depending on what the professor wants. They save money by buying fewer machines overall, as the article states.
Besides, speaking overall, anti-Mac zealotry on the part of IT departments has been a huge barrier against more widespread adoption of Macs. IT people know Windows. They'd rather have to maintain only a single platform. In most business environments, and in many academic ones, there is no choice at all. It's just Windows. So what's the big deal if one institution decides to use machines that, gasp, can boot both Windows and the Mac OS? Must be zealotry. . .
I suppose they could save even more money by just refusing to buy Macs at all and forcing all courses to use Windows only. In that case, it would just be a smart financial decision, right? Happens all the time.
Boot camp will be out of beta as soon as Leopard arrives, which will be a few months at most. Not worth fretting about that at this point. Apple has to provide that disclaimer for the time being.
Decent color management and Photoshop (at least CS2 level). I'm not sure why color management hasn't arrived, but Photoshop may be the killer un-app. Adobe has no particular reason to make it easy to run under Parallels and even less reason to make a native port. No Gimp flames please. I've been playing with it on Ubuntu - actually pretty impressive, but not Photoshop. Not even close.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Well, art does have a well known liberal bias.
So does Slashdot.
Has anyone noticed that they aren't dumping Windows at all? They just want to use Bootcamp to cut down on total hardware costs and standardize on a single hardware platform. All they are actually dumping is beige-box PC hardware. They still plan to run Windows and Windows apps just like they did before.
Anyone except NASA in 2000.
http://hpc.sourceforge.net/NASA_G4_Study.pdf
Or the High Performance Computing gang..
http://hpc.sourceforge.net/index2.php
[UID-HeinzIntel]
Well, since all the hardware is being bought from Apple, the phrase 'all mac' isn't that wrong. No, they're not dumping Windows, but they are dumping every Windows based PC manufacturer out there. And I think that is just as significant.