Why does Dell run in the educational world?

[teacherrob9]

School districts are cheap but want this best for the money. If school districts were going to buy the cheapest, they'd buy an emachine... But they don't, they buy dell! Why? If apple's are cheaper to maintain and have better shelf lives, then why do schools buy dells 8 out of 10 times?

[teacherrob9]

same can be said about the business world too...

[wordmunger]

I imagine Dell's giving them insane deals. I bet in the end they're not much more than eMachines.

[teacherrob9]

actually the prices that dell charges school districts is really high! Most school districts lease... You'd be surprised how much that comes out to be...

[yg17]

School districts are cheap but want this best for the money. If school districts were going to buy the cheapest, they'd buy an emachine... But they don't, they buy dell! Why? If apple's are cheaper to maintain and have better shelf lives, then why do schools buy dells 8 out of 10 times?

http://www.ebaumsworld.com/forumfun/whocares4.jpg

[teacherrob9]

my question is how did apple drop the ball? When I was in school, not teaching, everyone had a mac IIGS... What happened? HOw did apple screw that up?

[FFTT]

Generally most major Windows Certified IT buyers and support personnel
are under pressure to justify their own existence in the workplace.

Unfortunately, the math some of these " professionals " use tends to
ignore how much their client would save if they could run reliably and securely with 1/3 of their IT staff budget.

[teacherrob9]

Not true... Penn State in the late 90's had half PCs and half apples..
They had the same amount of IT staff for both factions... Pure fact.



Generally most major Windows Certified IT buyers and support personnel
are under pressure to justify their own existence in the workplace.

Unfortunately, the math some of these " professionals " use tends to
ignore how much their client would save if they could run reliably and securely with 1/3 of their IT staff budget.

[dejo]

If apple's are cheaper to maintain and have better shelf lives, then why do schools buy dells 8 out of 10 times?

Do you have a link to some study to backup that claim?

[Photorun]

actually the prices that dell charges school districts is really high! Most school districts lease... You'd be surprised how much that comes out to be...

Yep, it's true, Dell as "cheap" is total FUD. The college I work at has a sleazy Dull rep (not that it'd surprise anyone) and then the head of IT and purchasing get kickbacks for ordering Dulls. It's borderline criminal, but it's how Dull works, phony bait and switch ads, backdoor deals, they're out there en mass because people are chumps, not because they're a great computer.

The computers get billed back to the various departments it's easy to see what a ripoff the Dull are. Like two basic configured machines with a P4, one of which died three months in, came to over $1200 a piece and they were low spec machine. Low specs that even a friggin' eMac would have been almost half as expensive via edu pricing and been more stable, had more uptime, and be infinitely more useable.

And, of course, they're complete worthless steaming piles of poo, if not worse to the mass purchase world, I swear they either shluff off refurbs or they're assembled by monkeys. One order of two ton FUGLY laptops came with the DOA as high as 1 out of 4... 25%!!! The sleazy polyester suit wearing smug Dell guy give the dumb, non-technical, total management whore a free lunch, probably some thing extra though she's as ugly as an exploded elephant on toast.

Despite Apple in reports lasting longer, having more lifespan, and ultimately cheaper the FUD and other lies and false realities, not to mention kickbacks, and shady deals, keep Dell chewing away at the educational pie. Even though it's totally obvious from both a bookkeeping, cost on delivery, and just by seeing blue screens of death or malware going through the firewalls and crashes far outnumbering OS X. As far as management is concerned and IT departments that KNOW if there were only Macs, they'd need 1/4 the staff (staff = power, power = job security... with for peecees is their only known strength, that or solitaire) hence they keep the Dulls coming and the downtime, the malware, the need for stupid soulless zombie IT people who don't know crap about crap for peecee losers, coming back for more and more.

Telling it like it is, but bitter.

[Photorun]

Not true... Penn State in the late 90's had half PCs and half apples..
They had the same amount of IT staff for both factions... Pure fact.

Garbage. We have 8000 computers, 6500 peecees. 11 IT staff, only one is a Mac person and she's not allowed to say she works on Macs because of the kickback scheme. I sit between two labs, one all Mac, one all peecee. One lab has a peecee IT weenie in there almost every day of the week, the other lab is pretty much self maintaining.

Deal with that peecee apologists.

[FFTT]

I think teacherrob9 will enjoy using Mac OSX and hopefully he'll
use the Macrumors Starters guide if he runs into any problems.

It might be more productive to know what he actually uses a computer for.

[Gymnut]

Not true... Penn State in the late 90's had half PCs and half apples..
They had the same amount of IT staff for both factions... Pure fact.

And what year is it now? Ah yes 2006, a mere 7+ years ago. :rolleyes:

[milo]

School districts are cheap but want this best for the money. If school districts were going to buy the cheapest, they'd buy an emachine... But they don't, they buy dell! Why? If apple's are cheaper to maintain and have better shelf lives, then why do schools buy dells 8 out of 10 times?

Are there mods on these boards?

This is the third thread from this poster to make it to the front page, and all three are just "hey, isn't dell better" threads. I wouldn't be surprised if it's a dell employee from what they've written.

[fiercetiger224]

Can I just keep posting like this? ;)

[MacRy]

I'll tell you why:

Dell Optiplex GX620 Mini Tower
Pentium D830 (3.0GHz Dual Core)
2Gb RAM
160GB HDD
DVDRW
19' TFT Monitor
Mouse
Keyboard
3.5" Floppy
Windows XP Pro
3yr Next Business Day Warranty

With the educational discount that Dell gives my LEA (Local Education Authority) that comes to the princely sum of £730.00

I work for an IT support service in the Education sector and a lot of what one poster has said here is absolute crap. The hardware that comes from Dell is of a very decent quality and the DOA rate is actually more like 4%. Considering they manufacture 40k+ units a day from their Irish manufacturing unit that isn't bad at all. We have three Macs in our unit, all of which have had to go back to Apple because of faults that they shipped with. One of which I am typing on now. I love OSX and Apple hardware but I fail to see the point in bashing the likes of Dell just for the sake of it. Especially when not armed with all of the facts.

[dirtleg]

My wife teaches in a large St. Louis school district, every teacher has an imac on their desk. They are kept current in hardware and operating systems fairly regularly. Computer lab in the library has a dozen or more imacs for student use. The district is considering issuing Mac notebooks to incoming freshman to use throughout their years in high school, and to keep on graduation. The district uses Power School software for grading and parent access to student grades and teacher/parent communication.

My daughter attends the Univ. of Missouri, about half of the students and faculty use Mac's.

Mac's are not dead in the education system.

[RacerX]

my question is how did apple drop the ball? When I was in school, not teaching, everyone had a mac IIGS... What happened? HOw did apple screw that up?You know... asked by someone else this could be an interesting question (and I could give you a very interesting answer).

But you've spent a lot of time in the past 24 hours trying to stir up trouble.

What are the points of your threads/posts here? You aren't looking for answers (you tend to counter any answers given to you)... so it seems like you ask the question so you can give the answer you want us to hear.


I have an idea... stop asking these questions, and just put your anti-Apple (pro-Dell/pro-XP) commentary into one long post. It would at least seem more genuine than the bait-n-switch technique you are using now.

[rockandrule]

About every professor's office that I see here at the University of North Florida has a shiny Mac sitting next to the crap-job Dells that the school gives out. My English professor even used his as a foot stool. How convenient, eh?;)

[spencecb]

It depends on if you are talking about high schools as opposed to higher education institutions. I believe that in the case of high school, middle school, elementary school, there was a time when Apple's computers were too expensive and did not have the development support that they had in the past, and have once again. This is the time in which schools migrated toward Windows.

Universities have never let go of Apple. You probably won't see many Macs in the business school of a university, but you better believe that they are all over the arts and sciences.

This, of course, could all change now with Boot Camp. Think of the posibilities. At one time, a university had to keep Macs for (for example) architecture students, and Windows computers for their business students. Now, Macs can do both. So why is there a need to maintain two different contracts with two different computer manufacturers. This opens up new business opportunities for Apple at the university level, and it would be in their best interest to bombard universities with the new possibilities of the Mac.

[Jedi128]

I am a senior in high school right now and every school year of my life has been dominated by Macs. Even when I lived in the more rural part of Ohio we had Apples (some, no windows mind you). However, since Apples last so long the district takes forever to replace them and the standard computer at the school is 500Mhz G3 iMac. With fricken 9 on it. I think the grading software, or some other one random app doesn't exist in X so they are continueing to live in the past. I believe next year new computers are coming for us, too bad I'll be in college typing away on my Macbook Pro...

[calebjohnston]

Too bad you'll be on your MBP?

Jesus, MBP. You must be poor.

:)

I recently bought a power mac with 16 gigs of ram and I'm only going to use safari on it.


I have way too much free time.

[bobber205]

Our school only uses macs. The only PC is the superintendent's computer.

Oh. Big surprise. Within 5 minutes of his computer hooking up to the network, the dude didn't have his anti-virus software updated and our network crashed.

That was fun to fix. ;)