At the university I work at we have 9,000+ ThinkPad's and roughly 1,000 iBooks we started this in 1999 as a pilot and it has taken off. Each Art and Design student was issued an iBook but we did not get rid of the labs because the iBooks simply cannot process large apps like a powerMac can. We use a key server for our apps like Photoshop, macromedia studio, etc.. and that keeps us in line for our licensing. I do agree with making the students buy the laptop. We lease our laptops to the students and they treat them like garbage (no joke we have actually had people urinate on the computers before) plus they get attached to the computer they have and when the lease is up (in two years) you get a new computer. That tends to throw a lot of people off. We do make a custom image for the notebooks that include things like MS office, and Symantec Anti-Virus Corporate edition. I would say the hardest part of the whole thing is getting the computers back. We have a lot of assets out there and they get stolen, destroyed, or the student flat out doesn't want to turn it back in and we have to track them all over the US.
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At the university I work at we have 9,000+ ThinkPad's and roughly 1,000 iBooks we started this in 1999 as a pilot and it has taken off. Each Art and Design student was issued an iBook but we did not get rid of the labs because the iBooks simply cannot process large apps like a powerMac can. We use a key server for our apps like Photoshop, macromedia studio, etc.. and that keeps us in line for our licensing. I do agree with making the students buy the laptop. We lease our laptops to the students and they treat them like garbage (no joke we have actually had people urinate on the computers before) plus they get attached to the computer they have and when the lease is up (in two years) you get a new computer. That tends to throw a lot of people off. We do make a custom image for the notebooks that include things like MS office, and Symantec Anti-Virus Corporate edition. I would say the hardest part of the whole thing is getting the computers back. We have a lot of assets out there and they get stolen, destroyed, or the student flat out doesn't want to turn it back in and we have to track them all over the US.