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G5's on Campus?

chucknorris

chucknorris

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 28, 2005
559
0
Moscow, ID (No Kremlin here!)
As I've familiarized myself with this campus, visiting the hubs of student life, I've realized that the University of Idaho is decidedly "G4."

Each computer lab has several PowerMacs, most of which have 1.25 GHz G4s, and a G4 iMac is featured prominently in the library.

The question which arises out of this is...are any college campuses predominantly G5 based yet?

It seems to me that G5s offer much better value than their predecessors, especially where the iMac is concerned (according to apple-history.com, Apple transitioned from a 20" iMac G4 w/167 MHz fsb, 80 GB hd, etc. for $2199 to a 20" iMac G5 w/600 MHz fsb, 160 GB hd, etc. for $1899), so it wouldn't be too far-fetched for adoption to go rather quickly.

This university, due to Idaho's steadfastly conservative economic policy :mad:, has very little breathing room financially right now. (auf Deutsch: Das Geld ist knapp!)

Anyway, just idle curiosity here. Please reply one way or another.
 
My school (University of Vermont) has a huge computer lab full of G5's. The best part is they are connected to the old apple 17" LCD monitors, looks real sharp. I guess it comes from the time the school is interested in buying new computers. Obviously when you school was in the market for new computer, all that was out were the G4 towers. For my school, they replaced them about 2 years ago so they were able to get G5's.
 
wwooden said:
My school (University of Vermont) has a huge computer lab full of G5's. The best part is they are connected to the old apple 17" LCD monitors, looks real sharp. I guess it comes from the time the school is interested in buying new computers. Obviously when you school was in the market for new computer, all that was out were the G4 towers. For my school, they replaced them about 2 years ago so they were able to get G5's.
Click to expand...

Very interesting!
That G5 lab setup sounds sweet. I can imagine how slick it must look.
 
My school upgraded all of their labs to dual G5 PMs and 20" ACDs. I think there are about 40 of them there. All the art students also (part of tuition) have iBook G4s.

When I was there we had dual G4's for 3D model rendering and final cut pro, 3 rows of dual monitors... It was rad.
 
yeah my school's web program is all g5's. Of course, they got them the year after I graduated and I was stuck using PC's most of the time :mad:
 
My school just replaced its the main student computer labs iMac G4s with iMac G5s. Unfortunately they are all 17" with a combo drive and the school has them set up in a funny way so that they can control what apps you use as well as create a clean user account every time someone logs out. But they are still nice.

That is the only computer lab that I have been to that has Macs on campus. Although that is because I am an engineer so all of our labs in this section of campus are either Sun or HPs running Red Hat. I know that our major theater hall (Krannert Center) practicaly runs on iMac G3s :eek: .
 
My Uni (University of Lincoln, UK) has just taken out a load of single G4 PowerMacs with 17inch Apple displays and replaced them with dual 2.3ghz G5's, with 2gb RAM + 20inch ACD's. All rather pleasing to the eye :)

They've got a load of eMacs too, but there's no plans to upgrade those yet... I have no idea where all the money came from though- they've just started work on two major buildings....
 
Lunja said:
My Uni (University of Lincoln, UK) has just taken out a load of single G4 PowerMacs with 17inch Apple displays and replaced them with dual 2.3ghz G5's, with 2gb RAM + 20inch ACD's. All rather pleasing to the eye :)

They've got a load of eMacs too, but there's no plans to upgrade those yet... I have no idea where all the money came from though- they've just started work on two major buildings....
Click to expand...

the mac lab at my uni is full of hockey puck wielding iMac G3's so you all can take your whinging elsewhere...... :D :(
 
chucknorris said:
The question which arises out of this is...are any college campuses predominantly G5 based yet?
Click to expand...

Yes. UMaine is. We have 2 labs (that I use) with power mac G5s, all duals...some 1.8 some 2.5s. Another lab is all iMac G5s, one of the edu rooms (teachers in training etc) is again all iMac G5s, in fact, the only G4s on campus I can think of is one lab with G4 Power Macs, and an email lounge with a bunch of eMacs.
 
We are basically all G5's. A G4 here and there. We had the Dual 2.5's right when they came out last year. I was suprised as most people on this forum cited long ship times and such.
 
University of Washington (Seattle) has one a floor of MDD G4s in one of the libraries. I'd say about 60-80 computers. And then we have a lab full of dual 2GHz G5s attached to the old style 23" cimima displays, probably about 40-50 of those. Randomly these have things like video import boxes and scanners attached to them. And unlike highschool where you were not allowed to do anything with them (oh and they keep OS9 because they have some archaic memo system that will only run there), you can do anything you please with the G5s. I've taken in an external hard drive with games to play before I got my dual 1.8, very good machines.
 
We have a wide range from G3 iMacs to the dual procesor G5s. It depends on where you look.

The faculty have whatever they want in their office. Most went for the G4 and G5 towers (depending on when they were purchased) with as large of ACD they could manage to get the department chairs to sign off on.

The Art department's graphic rendering lab has the dual processor G5s. They bought them right when they first came out and have had never ending problems with them.

The general access labs have shiny new Mac Mini's with Dell flat panels. They went with the Mac Mini's because the lab and classroom computers are funded out of a special assessment added to the tuition. Since most of the lab computers were being used for checking email, surfing, and word processing, they saved the money and bought the Mini.

And finally, hidden behind the scenes, our Novell servers' storage is on a cluster of Xserve RAID drives.
 
I goto school in California at Cal State San Marcos and we have all brand new G5's in our computer labs. Last year we had G4's and when I came back from summer break, I noticed all the new G5s. They also replaced all of the PCs with brand new Dell computers... Thing that bugs me is that there are scanners in the labs, but there aren't any hooked up to a Mac...
 
At my school we have about 100 G5s in the main library lab (about 150 PCs in the same room). Other labs in the library have iMac G4s and iMac G5s in them. Until this year there were quite a few PowerMac G4s around, but they seem to have been replaced finally. I even know where one Cube is in a lab that is otherwise 100% PC. I also know where a B&W G3 is with OS 8 on it in a Windows/Linux lab (it's for slide scanning/printing).
 
We swithed last semester from G4 400mHz to the 1.8 iMac 20" Superdrive, which are so nice. I personally have a D2.5 w/20" bought with my own money. Its so nice that i can now be able to work on either, without a speed issue. The only issue now is that they need to upgrade to Adobe CS or CS2 as they are a little behind in the times. Btw we have about 30 iMacs, 2 epson 2200's, 2 epson 1280's and 1 Epson 10000, and 1 Epson 7000. Love my lab especially since i have access to the large format printers.

Forgot to add they are seeling the 400mhz G4s to the students, and including the 17' CRT monitor. Won't tell the price, its a steal. I plan on using it as a music image server for back ups and streaming musinc throughout my house/apartment when i graduate in a few months.
 
At my school, there's one G5, two G4s about 3/4 iMacs and an eMac or two. It seems that the ever shrinking media deaprtment needs these, and they won't let anyone else use them.
 
my school manages to have 2 or 3 Macs in the common access computer labs(not the specialty web or art design labs), which is pretty sweet, especially since for some weird reason i formated my USB drive as Mac OS extended once, and in order to print from the labs, i must use a Mac OS X computer. our music tech labs has about 16 1.8 dual G5s and we just got 20in Apple monitors with some kinda spiffy arm attachment things. i'll have to see if they're going to sell the old 17in apple monitors that just got replaced. the music lab is still on panther, but i don't blame them. we put tons of software on those things, once we get them stable we really don't want to mess around with it. everywhere else is Tiger. we have a Protools HD96 studios (i think it may be upgraded to 192 soon) that runs off dual 1.42 G4s i do believe, but for protools, the HD box and TDM cards do most of the work anyway. i hope protools upgrades soon and gets better though.
 
I'm getting jealous and then thankful and then jealous again. :p

At the end of the day though, in the endless sea of PCs, a Mac is a Mac-something to be treasured.

To lend an anecdote...One day I was running late for everything and had to print out a lab sheet 5 minutes before my chem lab. The library had the closest computers, so I ran there and plopped myself in front of a trusty G4.

After flying through the login process (Novell can go to hell!), I pulled up the PDF file pressed CMD+P, clicked through the print dialog, and logged out. I grabbed the lab sheet off the printer on my way toward the exit, noting that someone who entered at the same time was still mired in the login process on a PC.

I nearly cried from gratitude!

Anyway, I imagine I'll come back next year or the year after, and be pleasantly surprised...
 
Notre Dame's labs are pretty much split 60/40 PC/Mac. The Macs are mostly dual 1.42 G4 MDDs with between 512mb-1gb ram in each. No sign of the G5s, but the G4s we've got are no slouches!
 
My school has a few very old PowerMac G4s (probably first gen) in the library that are painfully slow, and a few professors here and there have a Mac in their office. That's about it.


Most students are Windows. However, yesterday I was killing time between classes in one of the computer labs that has tables and wireless so you can bring your own laptop. Out of 7 students with laptops, 5 of us had Macs. I was shocked since Windows greatly outnumbers Macs on campus. Then a discussion started between a few of the Mac guys about how they love OSX, but I was too busy with work to join in. Needless to say, it made me smile. Usually, I yank out my Powerbook and have people looking at me like "What kind of idiot uses a Mac?" but this time, it was us looking at the 2 guys with Windows laptops thinking "What kind of idiot uses Windows?"
 
Let see, about:

30-40 iMac G5's, 25 Powermac g5's, 10-15 iMac G3's + a bunch of G4 towers.

A nice few.
 
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