Hello,
Your article was very alarming. Everything that you said about the Macintosh was false. "And Macs are better for graphics and videos -- or so I'm told. I have always used PCs so I don't really know if Macs are indeed superior" Well, I'm here to tell you that Macs are indeed superior. Macs have built into the operating system support for graphics and video to be offloaded to the video card, thereby making the graphics smoother and run faster. Also, in the next version of the operating system (10.4, codenamed Tiger) will include support for Core Video and Core Image. This is an expansion of the Core Audio technology built into the current version of the operating system, Panther (10.3). There is more information available at Apple's website (
www.apple.com) and in the OS X tab of it.
"But with PCs locking in 97 percent of the market, deciding what kind of computers to use in a school system is a no-brainer."
Really? The task of keeping a Windows based network online is amazingly costly. For anti-spyware programs (free for personal use, but try a network of a few thousand comptueres) anti-virus (costly anyways, and each year you need to pay), and also the time to upgrade the computers physically. Whereas there are quite a large number of Mac owners with 6 and 7 year old computers that run very well, if a bit slow but still very usable, a comparable Windows computer would be long gone. Each OS X update has become faster and faster for these older computers, too, not bogging them down with useless junk. And the 3% market share figure is flawed. There are estimates that range from 7% to 2.1%. It is hard to calculate because Macs last a long time. I have an aunt with two LC580s in her classroom. They are 10 year old computers. They work perfectly. The 4 year old Windows computers are left alone, because they are too slow to do anything and too full of malware/worms/trogans/viruses to do anythimg with. Hard to calculate market share when computers that are 10 years old are thrown into the mix.
"That process of copying projects and files to a floppy disk and using the stored files at home and work is similar to what happens millions of times a day at offices throughout the world.*
Good lord! Floppies! A single word document nowadays barely fits onto a floppy. Macs haven't included a floppy drive for nearly 6 years and for good reason-- nobody uses them anymore! A song file takes up 3 times the space on a floppy. A JPEG image takes up an entire floppy, if you compress it to a few pixels. A USB flash drive, sometimes called a thumb drive, does that job far better than a floppy. And Macs have supported them for years. Before Windows supported USB. Plug it in, drag your files to it, eject it, pull it out. Presto. On a Windows computer, plug it in, wait for Windows to notice it, wait for drivers to be installed (what drivers? It is a simple USB Mass Storage Device!) and then scan it for viruses. Now you may use it. But use the old FAT32 format, because NTFS has some issues on some flash drives. And repeat that procedure each and every time you want to use a file, compared to the Mac. Insert, drag and drop, eject, and take it with you. Windows takes forever! And why? I don't know. It shouldn't.
"If nothing else, Mac users are passionate about their computers. They believe Macs are easier to operate and don't require as much maintenance."
Damn right we're passionate.
And Macs can do anything easier, faster, and without as many hassles as a Windows computer. Anything. Burn a CD? Insert the CD, drag files, click burn. Burn a music CD? Open iTunes, drag songs to a playlist, click burn. Burn a DVD? Open iDVD, make DVD, click burn.
Windows? Eh... Lets not go there. Long story.
What is the maintenance on your Windows computer? Do you scan for viruses, adware, spyware, and other malware? Do you defragment? Do you reinstall Windows every year?
On my Mac, I repair permissions before I install software. That's it. I DO OWN a Windows computer. I have to defragment it every month. I must scan for viruses every weekend. I must scan for adware and spyware every other day! Just to use it! Why is that? I use Mozilla. That helps cut down on the stuff coming in. But honestly, when the same people who designed Internet Explorer designed Windows, the quality scares me. The amount of plain BAD STUFF that I receive every day if I use Internet Explorer? A few dozen. And I don't go to random sites, I just use Google for school assignments and such. Hence the reason why I use Mozilla.
"Thinking back to that initial meeting in the high school library, I see now that for all their postulating about technology, the teachers really didn't understand its applications in the educational environment."
Maybe they understood it better than you did? Teacher does know best...
"Sure, they could write programs, create Web sites and surf the Internet, but they didn't realize that computer technology is a tool to use at home and school."
They did. That is why that wanted you to use the Mac. You can do all that at the same time on a Mac. And burn a DVD. And use iChat (Instant Messaging Program) to talk with my friends. I can do that at the same time. On a computer that is now going on 3 years. It is an iMac 800Mhz G4, 768MB of RAM, and a 60GB hard drive. It runs Jaguar (10.2) which isn't even the latest and greatest version of the operating system! I have yet to see a Windows computer do that without crashing, corrupting the website, making the DVD into a 'coaster' and botch the program I was writing. And the sites I was looking at for school? Gone. Now my computer science project is back at square one. Yes, that has happened to me before. I wasn't happy. My computer is by no means a bad one, but it is very annoying to have constant program crashes, error messages, and more.
This email that I write to you has not been saved once. I am merely writing it out in my email program. I have a web browser open with 4 tabs open. I have iChat open. I am listening to music in iTunes. And I am not worried that my computer will crash and loose this email.
