Sounds like you are the one who's full of crap. I LOOKED UP the prices BEFORE I explained them. I also know people who have paid as much for it. Amazon has Windows XP Professional FULL version for $279. Other resellers have it about that price, non-OEM, non-educational.
The site licenses are still more expensive. Besides, you don't necessarily NEED site licenses unless you're upgrading because the PCs come with OSes.
And yes, it is in fact the same thing. Replacing hardware is replacing hardware. Period. You cannot argue that. The cost of individual components is another situation. I'm sure if you'd sit and graph everything out, between the costs of software/hardware/failures/etc it's relatively balanced for the most part.
If the school is that worried about hardware, they can spring for AppleCare and that covers the machines for three years. That's about $250, probably less depending on Apple's offerings for that in the field of education. AppleCare has already covered about $1000 in parts for my iBook - LCD panel problems and a dead hard drive. That's not a bad deal, especially when you can't purchase off-the-shelf components to fix it and the out-of-warranty repair from Apple is nothing short of highway robbery.
I do agree with you that the PC parts are easy to swap and generally cheaper. Yes, schools have larger installations of machines and they do fail, regardless of what kind of machine it is. When our campus started purchasing new machines, we had a couple of dead monitors and a few dead hard drives. It happens. At least if those failures are early enough [or the machines are DOA] then they're warrantied. No extra costs.
I've just seen alot more dead PCs than I have Macs. They're not made as cheaply and generally hold up much better than PCs.
I guess overall it depends what your IT people feel like dealing with and how anti-Mac they are. I recommend taking a look at http://macvspc.info/ - especially that little part about PCs being cheaper than Macs:)
And exactly why can't I? TCO = TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP. That covers everything. You can buy spare Macs just like you can PCs. So, the PC parts are more easily interchangable. Big deal. If you're counting on playing musical chairs with your components that much then you've got bigger problems than I care to discuss.
If the internal display in an eMac fails, you can use an external VGA display until you can get the machine repaired. Do you throw away your PC because a component dies? No. You replace it. It's the same thing with Macs.
Under most circumstances? Simple economics? Bullocks. Cheaper purchase price doesn't mean that it's cheaper in general, think about TCO and the frustration you'll have to deal with when faculty get up in your face because their machines are down because of the latest Windows virus... And of course, those numbers in your comment aren't a good example. It's comparing a cheap PC to a more expensive Mac. Do a little bit of research.
A base-model eMac starts at $799 retail, $749 educational and i'm fairly sure Apple gives a bigger discount for purchasing larger quantities. Yes, there are base configuration PCs that start out lower, but the hardware in the eMac is more bang for your buck. The machines are also better for classrooms since everything is built-in, along with a great 17" display. I can't speak much on the side of 'educational' software as I've never really used any. I do know however that there are some applications that do need a decent video card to run well - you won't get that with cheap bargain basement PCs - the eMac comes with a Radeon 9200 and 32MB dedicated video memory. The last time I looked at a newer Dell purchased by a school at a cheap price - integrated Intel video chipset that was sharing the system's RAM. Talk about slowing down the GUI.
Also, consider this - cheap PCs come with anti-virus demoware [the majority of the time], not full versions, so the school is going to have to invest in that if they don't want to worry about infecting their entire network. That costs money. I can almost safely say they could set up OS X machines and not have a virus problem, unlike Windows which can get infected just by being out on the internet. Viruses = downtime. When my college got Norton Anti-virus Corporate Edition, it wasn't cheap. With Macs, viruses aren't such a high priority on the worry list and it's generally safe to run them without virus protection. With a limited user account for students, the worst that could happen is that the student could trash that account's home folder. No big deal, really.
I can also say that upgrading MacOS versions is a hell of alot cheaper than Windows versions. An individual copy of OS X 10.3 retails for $129, and education drops that to $69. It can be used for clean installations or upgrades. The full version of Windows XP Professional [retail, none of that OEM crap] catches around $300, an upgrade costs about $200. A friend of mine purchased hers through an education site for $99. And then of course, no upgrading Windows without a previous version.
I won't even get started on how much easier the OS is to manage either. When was the last time you set up Windows without needing a bunch of drivers to go along with it? Yet another problem avoided by switching to Mac.
I do believe that schools should do what is best for them, so I'm not just pushing for the Mac, but as far as I'm concerned they look at the short-term costs instead of how much better things would be in the long run if they just spent the money upfront and got it over with.
When I was working for my college Help Desk, we frequently used AIM to chat between Help Desk employees in one building with the Computer Center employees in another building. It's a great tool to have instead of trying to jot down notes from the admins over the telephone, and you can easily save things to share with others or keep for future reference.
The biggest problem was that we used to have frequent campus-wide problems because AOL's servers would lock us out when we attempted too many connections from our IP address. If we got disconnected from our ISP, every computer that was set to auto-reconnect [a great default option, AOL, seriously] would start trying to log in and in a matter of minutes everyone was receiving the "You are attempting to sign on again too soon" error message, even if you hadn't been connected previously or trying to sign on. There were times it took over an hour or more to be able to reconnect to AOL's network.
I wonder if something like this would allow the services to function on the internal network if the connection to the ISP is lost. It does have potential to be highly useful in a situation like ours. Of course there are other clients that can do this, but who wants to bother with those or using obnoxious pop-up Windows messages? And that of course leaves out systems that aren't running Windows.
the 95/98/2000/XP naming scheme is simply vanity. the true version numbers are still there, just not put out in plain view. if you open a command prompt in Windows and use the VER command - you get a 4.x.x version number back in the 9x/ME versions, you get 5.x version back in 2000, XP, and 2003.
using the VER command on a system running XP:
Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
I've been bitching that I wanted number versions back since they killed them with Win95 and the last version number-ed NT 4. It was a stupid move and it also makes the OS seem even older and outdated. But then again do you want to be running Microsoft Windows version 23.5 in the future? Eh, I think I'd rather deal with the version numbers.
Macromedia has already started making their own mess as well, there's so gonna be so much crap tacked on to their product titles that you're gonna be trying to say them for five minutes... Studio MX, Studio MX 2004, and so on. Adobe's moved to this "CS" stuff... Yeah I'm using Adobe Photoshop CS 2.0 which would really be Photoshop 9.0... how annoying!
When the hell did all of the developers get together and make the decision to do this?
and one last bit: I totally read "Blue Shift" as "Blue Shit". Blue shit = blue screen? At least for most people it's about as useful because nobody can make anything sensible out of an NT crashes' dump anyway.:)
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You are full of crap
Sounds like you are the one who's full of crap. I LOOKED UP the prices BEFORE I explained them. I also know people who have paid as much for it. Amazon has Windows XP Professional FULL version for $279. Other resellers have it about that price, non-OEM, non-educational.
The site licenses are still more expensive. Besides, you don't necessarily NEED site licenses unless you're upgrading because the PCs come with OSes.
And yes, it is in fact the same thing. Replacing hardware is replacing hardware. Period. You cannot argue that. The cost of individual components is another situation. I'm sure if you'd sit and graph everything out, between the costs of software/hardware/failures/etc it's relatively balanced for the most part.
If the school is that worried about hardware, they can spring for AppleCare and that covers the machines for three years. That's about $250, probably less depending on Apple's offerings for that in the field of education. AppleCare has already covered about $1000 in parts for my iBook - LCD panel problems and a dead hard drive. That's not a bad deal, especially when you can't purchase off-the-shelf components to fix it and the out-of-warranty repair from Apple is nothing short of highway robbery.
I do agree with you that the PC parts are easy to swap and generally cheaper. Yes, schools have larger installations of machines and they do fail, regardless of what kind of machine it is. When our campus started purchasing new machines, we had a couple of dead monitors and a few dead hard drives. It happens. At least if those failures are early enough [or the machines are DOA] then they're warrantied. No extra costs.
I've just seen alot more dead PCs than I have Macs. They're not made as cheaply and generally hold up much better than PCs.
I guess overall it depends what your IT people feel like dealing with and how anti-Mac they are. I recommend taking a look at http://macvspc.info/ - especially that little part about PCs being cheaper than Macs :)
And exactly why can't I? TCO = TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP. That covers everything. You can buy spare Macs just like you can PCs. So, the PC parts are more easily interchangable. Big deal. If you're counting on playing musical chairs with your components that much then you've got bigger problems than I care to discuss.
If the internal display in an eMac fails, you can use an external VGA display until you can get the machine repaired. Do you throw away your PC because a component dies? No. You replace it. It's the same thing with Macs.
Therefore, your arguement isn't valid.
Under most circumstances? Simple economics? Bullocks. Cheaper purchase price doesn't mean that it's cheaper in general, think about TCO and the frustration you'll have to deal with when faculty get up in your face because their machines are down because of the latest Windows virus... And of course, those numbers in your comment aren't a good example. It's comparing a cheap PC to a more expensive Mac. Do a little bit of research.
A base-model eMac starts at $799 retail, $749 educational and i'm fairly sure Apple gives a bigger discount for purchasing larger quantities. Yes, there are base configuration PCs that start out lower, but the hardware in the eMac is more bang for your buck. The machines are also better for classrooms since everything is built-in, along with a great 17" display. I can't speak much on the side of 'educational' software as I've never really used any. I do know however that there are some applications that do need a decent video card to run well - you won't get that with cheap bargain basement PCs - the eMac comes with a Radeon 9200 and 32MB dedicated video memory. The last time I looked at a newer Dell purchased by a school at a cheap price - integrated Intel video chipset that was sharing the system's RAM. Talk about slowing down the GUI.
Also, consider this - cheap PCs come with anti-virus demoware [the majority of the time], not full versions, so the school is going to have to invest in that if they don't want to worry about infecting their entire network. That costs money. I can almost safely say they could set up OS X machines and not have a virus problem, unlike Windows which can get infected just by being out on the internet. Viruses = downtime. When my college got Norton Anti-virus Corporate Edition, it wasn't cheap. With Macs, viruses aren't such a high priority on the worry list and it's generally safe to run them without virus protection. With a limited user account for students, the worst that could happen is that the student could trash that account's home folder. No big deal, really.
I can also say that upgrading MacOS versions is a hell of alot cheaper than Windows versions. An individual copy of OS X 10.3 retails for $129, and education drops that to $69. It can be used for clean installations or upgrades. The full version of Windows XP Professional [retail, none of that OEM crap] catches around $300, an upgrade costs about $200. A friend of mine purchased hers through an education site for $99. And then of course, no upgrading Windows without a previous version.
I won't even get started on how much easier the OS is to manage either. When was the last time you set up Windows without needing a bunch of drivers to go along with it? Yet another problem avoided by switching to Mac.
I do believe that schools should do what is best for them, so I'm not just pushing for the Mac, but as far as I'm concerned they look at the short-term costs instead of how much better things would be in the long run if they just spent the money upfront and got it over with.
Tada, there's your history lesson for the day.
When I was working for my college Help Desk, we frequently used AIM to chat between Help Desk employees in one building with the Computer Center employees in another building. It's a great tool to have instead of trying to jot down notes from the admins over the telephone, and you can easily save things to share with others or keep for future reference.
The biggest problem was that we used to have frequent campus-wide problems because AOL's servers would lock us out when we attempted too many connections from our IP address. If we got disconnected from our ISP, every computer that was set to auto-reconnect [a great default option, AOL, seriously] would start trying to log in and in a matter of minutes everyone was receiving the "You are attempting to sign on again too soon" error message, even if you hadn't been connected previously or trying to sign on. There were times it took over an hour or more to be able to reconnect to AOL's network.
I wonder if something like this would allow the services to function on the internal network if the connection to the ISP is lost. It does have potential to be highly useful in a situation like ours. Of course there are other clients that can do this, but who wants to bother with those or using obnoxious pop-up Windows messages? And that of course leaves out systems that aren't running Windows.
the 95/98/2000/XP naming scheme is simply vanity. the true version numbers are still there, just not put out in plain view. if you open a command prompt in Windows and use the VER command - you get a 4.x.x version number back in the 9x/ME versions, you get 5.x version back in 2000, XP, and 2003. using the VER command on a system running XP: Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
I've been bitching that I wanted number versions back since they killed them with Win95 and the last version number-ed NT 4. It was a stupid move and it also makes the OS seem even older and outdated. But then again do you want to be running Microsoft Windows version 23.5 in the future? Eh, I think I'd rather deal with the version numbers.
:)
Macromedia has already started making their own mess as well, there's so gonna be so much crap tacked on to their product titles that you're gonna be trying to say them for five minutes... Studio MX, Studio MX 2004, and so on. Adobe's moved to this "CS" stuff... Yeah I'm using Adobe Photoshop CS 2.0 which would really be Photoshop 9.0... how annoying!
When the hell did all of the developers get together and make the decision to do this?
and one last bit: I totally read "Blue Shift" as "Blue Shit". Blue shit = blue screen? At least for most people it's about as useful because nobody can make anything sensible out of an NT crashes' dump anyway.