How should Apple regain the education market?

[pinto32]

For the last few years, Apple's marketshare in the education market has been shrinking at an alarming rate. More and more school districts are choosing PCs because of thier lower initial price and market dominance.

What do you think is the best way for Apple to reverse this trend?

 

[MacsRgr8]

I think the best thing to do, is not to make the school go out and buy a Mac & Monitor in one. Most schools already have those monitors.

So, as usuall..... a headless "cheap" G4... but me thinks me heard this somewhere before

 

[Frohickey]

One word...

iPorn!

 

[Kwyjibo]

I don't think they will, many people want their kids to use the same ora similar OS at home as they do at school.Plus with the huge market share windows has school who teach on windows are technically getting them more prepared for the real world. I don't agreee but from an objective point all of it makes sense.

 

[AMDMACMAN]

IF they want to win the education market back they would have to win back the real world market. Something I do not see them doing any time soon.

 

[Waluigi]

I wrote this on the eMacs Changing? thread

Over the past 5 years, I have done extensive consultant work for the IT needs for a k-12 school district. For years, my esteemed colugees have shut down my plans to buy macs, because you can get cheaper, and faster dell's. What apple needs is to put a G5 in all lines and an LCD screen in the eMac for the same price. If they did this they would beat dell in value hands down.

First of all, the eMac shouldn't be discoutinued:
1. Durable
2. Speakers are in the machine
3. Ultra Cheep
4. Hard to steel

Why the LCD screen in eMacs:
1. Smaller overall body of the machine
2. There will be less of a need to replace them in a few years when there are no such thing as CRT's
3. Price can be the same if apple produces enough in mass quanitity

Why Apple should go all G5
1. Less R&D for the OS since all the computers run on the same chip
2. Cheeper to mass produce tons of G5's, thus the price wouldn't go up to put a 1.6G5 rather then a 1GHz G4 in an eMac
3. Get rid of moto finally
4. With IBM churnning out processor updates more frequently, the high end G5 PowerMac will easily be much faster then the comsumer line even though they run on the same processor
5. Less consumer confusion
6. People won't feel they are buying a clearly outdated product on the low end machines
7. Apple would sell much more in the edu market in terms of desktops and laptops, and thus more districts will buy xserves, and increase xserve sales.
8. All computers will have all the new IO ports, and new standards like SATA, PCI-X, etc

January/Feburary 2005:
PowerMac: Dual 3.5GHz G5
PowerBook: Dual 3GHz G5

iMac: 2.5GHz G5
iBook: 2.5GHz G5
eMac: 2GHz G5

Basically, our district has gone dell every year for the last 5 years I've been working there because the macs that are in our price range are crippled in performance. I would love to go into a budget meeting, present my plan to go mac, and have it approved. Can apple switch to G5 by the end of MWSF 2005?

--Waluigi

So, that is what Apple needs to do to get themselves in the position to retake the education market by storm.

Those who suggest apple has to make a cheap headless mac to get back the education market are just wrong. For me, it is so much easier to work with the old iMacs then any tower and monitor system hands down. The Art department buys the towers, and the computer labs have iMacs....there is no room

However, that is only half the battle. In order for people to switch to Apple, they first need to overcome the following:
1. Stuck in OS 9, or windows
2. General uneducation in the community regaurding macs
3. Every student uses floppy drives

I can easily change my district by buying a ton of G5 eMacs (at a great price) thus having a lot of systems running OS X, thus we can justify switching our software and servers to OS X; educating everyone about why Apple is the way to go instead of Microsoft (basically giving a steve jobs keynote to the board of ed); and supply students with CD-R's and USB flash drives, and bring them into this century.

Apple really needs to aggressivly market themselves, and really show off the beauty of their rock hard systems. Now is a greater time then ever to brag about not having major virus on the mac platform, having the world's 3rd fastest supercomputer, being user-oriented, and how unlike microsoft, using a mac allows students to create and explore, and really reach their full potential.

I really do forsee Apple being king in education again within the next few years.

--Waluigi

 

[Dont Hurt Me]

Apple has to become mainstream again, they are doing so many things wrong except for the ipod. I mean first of all how many more years of motorola are we going to have to put up with? why not have apple products like software and items that go with the mac in every store such as Walmart,Kmart,Sears,Staples etc etc. If they had a decent consumer line they could at least have a end counter with these and more mac stuff in these stores. right now you have to make a very special effort to find anything that is Mac. Apple just keeps screwing themself and the consumer line. as a outsider it looks like they dont want the consumer? I cant blame schools after all the rest of the world( 95%)are using Microstink software. so why not have lil jimmy learn on microstink so when he grows up he will know how to troubleshoot or call that I.T dept for another virus,another crash,another problem. This is Apples fault for going with a looser(motorola) and for making piss pot poor business decisions over the past 10 years. any other company would have folded. get back into the mainstream and schools will be buying. stay a exclusive player and be happy with that 5% marketshare and dont expect schools to come running. Apple has done this to themselves. I blame no one but Apple and some very sorry Ceo's.

 

[FuzzyBallz]

With the kind of education budget cuts states are having, unless Apple's giving them away, it's very very doubtful Apple will be back in the K-12 segment. Even 8 years ago my high school had a PC lab that's 5 times larger than the Mac lab. The PC lab systems were all Dell, and were purchased at a deep discount. The Mac lab had maybe 12 systems and even w/ the education discount, they were pretty expensive.

Nothing changed since 8 years ago. Apple still charges a lot of money for the tower systems and Dell's continuing their deep discount to K-12 school districts.

What is Apple's target market anyway? Private schools and rich people?

 

[ColdZero]

I work for a private school as their net admin. Apple stuff is really exensive for us. We're almost a 100% mac school, including administration, but I don't know how much longer we can afford it. We're coming up on the time we're going to be upgrading the lab, but I don't know if we can afford 30 computers at Apple's price when Dell has stuff so cheap that is much faster. We have a few dells in the school and for the most part have not required us to touch them in the 4 years we've had them. People trash dell a lot, but from what I've seen and used, they're pretty durable. We even had a kindergartener stick a crayon through the fan and it still worked. I really wish apple would offer more than they do for educational discounts. I'd really like to stay with apple, but the decision isn't all up to me.

 

[Kingsnapped]

First off:

2. There will be less of a need to replace them in a few years when there are no such thing as CRT's

Why would the CRT's eventual extinction require any replacements? The CRT's in the eMacs will still work just fine, and there will be plenty of people in the world that know how to repair them.

My school just invested in an eMac lab. They also bought about 100 Dells to replace the old boxes we had laying around. Although they purchaced more macs than we ever had before, people are still afraid of them.

As for storage, the kids that care have their own removable drive. There are also a few to borrow for short terms. We also have a nice server setup that lets us access our files from anywhere in the building.

I think the biggest problem is that students aren't framiliar with OSX, or they had bad experiances with 9. Although we have Word and Powerpoint installed, people don't understand that most basic processes (i.e. save, print) are the same. There's really no way to "fix" this unless the school went 100% macs.

 

[7on]

Coming from a campus that uses primarily 233Mhz iMacs running Jag for their mac lab computers, I can say that lots of schools upgrade unnecessarily. Most schools only need computers to surf the internet and type/print. Any system 5 years ago can do this task easily. I'm sure there are graphics labs that have different requirements, but that is different... My old HS, replaced computers (PCs) every year or two, mainly because just the monitors(or video cards) went bad. Jobs has stated, though, that his interests do not lie in marketshare alone but in changing the industry.

 

[Nermal]

Re: How should Apple regain the education market?

Originally posted by pinto32
For the last few years, Apple's marketshare in the education market has been shrinking at an alarming rate. More and more school districts are choosing PCs because of thier lower initial price and market dominance.

The other day, a lady I know said she needed to buy a laptop for her grandson. I politely listened. She proceeded to say that the school requires all their students to have an Apple laptop. At that point, I told her that I had an iBook, and how great it is.

But it's good to see that Macs are still being used in some schools.