Mac market share in private schools...

[72930]

My school is a private school (St Paul's, London), so people are richer and often better informed than in state schools, and it seems like one in four people now has a mac, as opposed to the one in ten last year.

I don't want to sound prejudiced against state schools as I know many people are clever there, but the proportion of people who don't have a clue about technology seems to be much larger.

 

[Scarlet Fever]

there are more people around my public school with Macs as well.

The only Macs the school own are >=1Ghz eMacs for the music department, but i think they are going to upgrade soon, and they are planning on setting up an XServe server system as well. If i can get my Desktop Technician certificate, they can pay me to set it up for them

 

[Eraserhead]

Maybe it's just privately educated people are richer, I mean you're going to spend more than £500 on a computer when you're paying £10'000 per year on private education.

Also they have ability-based entrance exams, so the people at them should be cleverer.

 

[paintballer]

In my school probably 1 in ten know what a Mac even is. No one I go to school with including the teachers knows anything about computers. Its actually quite fun though because I'll start talking to someone and I can say something really simple like tell them my PC has 1GB of ram and they don't know wtf I'm talking about and it just confuses them.

 

[Soton Speed]

Private schools also tend to be early adopters and the heads of IT tend to be switched on. State schools tend to have relatively small IT budgets or if extra money comes from the government it has restrictions attached - see computer projects 'sponsored' by Microsoft.

Due to their dominant market share Microsoft have managed to convince educators (ie. not just teachers) that kids would be disadvantaged if they don't learn Windows and Office, when you can learn basic computing skills on any computer system with a GUI (anyone remember Acorn?).