Re: Burned by updates?
Originally posted by kingtj
To be perfectly honest, I don't think Apple losing the K-12 market is a really big issue, when you look where they're headed. The big attraction to Macs for primary school (and even preschool!) was the relative simplicity of "classic" MacOS.
Teachers didn't need lots of training to begin doing useful things with a Mac in the classroom.
Nowdays, "simple" computers and OS's just aren't really being manufactured anymore. On the Microsoft side, you have additional new features being added by the thousands with each OS update, and the older ones being officially killed off. On the Apple side, you have everything "classic MacOS" being killed off, and the push is on to get XServe servers running in Corporate America, Powerbooks laptops sold to traditional Unix administrators, and G5's hawked to any self-proclaimed "power user" who wants a fast, 64-bit machine. Sure, they still offer the eMac for education, but it's no longer a "cornerstone" of Apple's sales plan.
I disagree. As much as the Mac is important to Apple, the Education market in general is important to them.
Do they offer "simple" computers anymore? Depends on what "simple" is. I hear fewer complaints about OS X than I did about System 7 and 8 (and 9), and certainly less than I hear about Windows 95, 98, Me, and XP. The thing is: if you were to spend real money on a computer today (ie, not wait for one to drop in your lap via a back-of-the-garage donation), you'd end up with one either running Mac OS X or some recent variant of Windows.
Apple's been reeling in numerous "a computer for every child" contracts over the past couple of years. These are big money makers and market makers for them.
In the "medium sized" districts, Apple does pretty well selling server boxes (XServes) for their back-room tracking and reporting. They also do quite well selling software to manage all this (PowerSchool).
The "large" districts went over to mainframe back rooms years ago, but Apple's working on them as well.
All of which is to say: Apple's focus on education hasn't really changed at all; it has expanded somewhat to include more than just the kindergarten classrooms.
There are loads and loads of "outdated" computers still functioning just fine - and I'm starting to see more and more of these "recycled" into daily use in the preschools and grade-schools. Why should a grade 4 teacher spend thousands of dollars on new eMacs and all new software to run on them, when he or she still has a closet full of perfectly good learning programs that run on MacOS 7.6? By the same token, people will gladly give away their old Pentium based PCs to schools, complete with software. As these free hand-out machines break down, I can see these schools buying new PC replacements, one by one, to keep up what they have - rather than blow huge budgets upgrading a whole computer lab.
Quite true, but hardly a new phenomenon. My children have been in a few schools and districts in the past several years, and there has always been a pretty large number of "second hand" computers kicking around -- many of which had been donated four or five years earlier. I donated about five hours of my time bringing some old 1993-era PCs back to life at one of my daughters' preschool in 2000, and I'd be surprised if that particular school has replaced their aging dinos yet. The smaller the school, the more likely this was to be the case, in my experience at least. Still, though, every one of those schools had a hand full of newer machines, which most often were the majority, which could run "modern" software quite well.
