Originally posted by jcdenton
You'd be surprised what people are running in large environments where upgrades are few and far between -- such as cash-strapped school districts. I just did some contract work at a high school that was running three labs of old iMac 400s with OS 9 and no plans to upgrade them to the OS X, at least for some time.
While most users are probably running OS X on newer computers, these days, having schools (or other environments) with approximately 100 OS 9 computers each does start to add up (I know that other schools in my city have similar configurations).
My work involved helping to set up a new OS X lab of recently ordered eMacs, but I was told that there were no plans to bring the other labs up to OS X at that time due to money shortages (this extended to using a Debian server rather than OS X Server on the grounds that it was "free," but that's another story...)
For educational school districts, Apple has extended so many initiatives to schools that it's hard to justify NOT upgrading to Mac OS X. My dad's school completely upgraded to Mac OS X this past year for a cost of $0. They did purchase 30 new eMacs, but that really is inconsequential -- they upgraded all of their computers, including lowly 333 MHz iMacs, to Jaguar. My dad and I (and the principal) coordinated a day of Mac OS X training, and that was it. My dad and the principal BOTH say that upgrading has totally simplified everything especially because of the stability of Mac OS X.
My dad did this by telling all of his teachers to apply for the X for Teachers promotion that Apple had offered for Jaguar -- any teacher could get Jaguar (the latest operating system at the time) free of charge. That means that when all of the school's faculty applied for the promotion, the school had enough licenses of Mac OS X to upgrade the whole school at no cost.
While Apple has not yet extended the promotion to Panther (and it has actually ended for Jaguar), any school who passed this up even if they weren't considering upgrading was incredibly foolish. Mac OS X can run well on any Mac OS X-supported Mac (for some benchmarks of Panther on a 233 MHz bondi blue iMac, see my article
here), and so there's no reason to put off upgrading if you can get the operating system for free.
With regards to the situation in other cases, like when schools have REALLY old hardware (Performas, all-in-one PowerMacs, etc.), I can understand not wanting to go through the upgrade because of the costs of new hardware. But I believe that many schools don't have Macs that are older than 5 years, and if they do, then at least a portion of their computers will be newer and able to run Mac OS X. Given the experience at my dad's school, upgrading any Mac to Mac OS X is going to have a big benefit at less support and problems, and so upgrading should be done ASAP.
Remember, applications almost always run just as well in Classic as they do natively in Mac OS X, so upgrading won't have any detrimental effect unless the program is really horribly-written so that it's incompatible with Classic but not with Mac OS 9. Furthermore, in addition to the X for Teachers promotion, Apple has practically given away iLife and Keynote for free to educational institutions before, too (excluding the standard $19.95 shipping and handling fee), and it has upped the educational discounts offered on its hardware. It's clear that Apple has done everything possible to help schools to upgrade.
In my opinion, if a school hasn't upgraded to Mac OS X yet, it's either got a lazy administrator, it's faculty has an indordinate amount of fear of upgrading, it's going to start moving to Windows, or it's a school district that is incredibly strapped for cash. There may be other minor reasons, but I just can't see any significant reason why the majority of educational institutions have not upgraded by now.
