The State of the Mac in Education
Schools
can now load up on $599 eMacs in 20-packs. Here's your chance
to upgrade your whole school.
Wednesday,
November 12th, 2003
Those who
would hesitate to buy Macs for their school based on price...well,
they've officially got another think coming. This graphic,
taken from an email from Apple that popped into my inbox this
week, says it all:
Not
surprisingly, these are the just-discontinued-model eMacs with
only a CD-ROM drive. But $599 is simply a steal. Compare it
to the $1199 price that Apple offered the original iMac to
schools at five years ago. In other words, a school can replace
an entire lab of aging Rev. A iMacs for about half the cost
that it took to assemble such a lab in the first place.
Just
to drive the point home, consider the differences between the
current $599 eMac and the original $1199 iMac:
- MacOS X Panther
(and MacOS 9.2) vs. MacOS 8.1
- 800 Mhz G4
vs. 233 Mhz G3
- 128 MB of
RAM vs. 32 MB of RAM
- 40 GB hard
drive vs. 4 GB hard drive
- 17 inch monitor
vs. 15 inch monitor
- hot-pluggable
VGA mirroring vs. nothing
- AppleWorks
6.2 vs. ClarisWorks 5.0
- Safari 1.1
vs. Netscape 4.5
- iMovie 3 vs.
nothing
- iPhoto 2 vs.
nothing
- iTunes 4 vs.
nothing
- USB and FireWire
vs. USB only
- Optical mouse
vs. hockey puck
Well, you get
the idea. Keep in mind that this is all for half the price of
five years ago. If nothing else, it underscores how the evolving
capabilities of the equipment have expanded the opportunities for
schools. Of all of the software titles (iPhoto, Keynote, iMovie,
AppleWorks 6) that comprised my lab curriculum at the end of my
elementary school tenure, not one of them even existed when I started
my tenure five years earlier. Try saying that about the Windows
platform.
And in case you're
wondering, the Apple Education site states that "a CD-set
of Mac OS X v10.3 Panther is included with each eMac". So
yeah, it's the latest and greatest -- no short-changing going on
here. By the way, they also boot into MacOS 9, for the luddites
among us. But I implore you to have the guts to run these puppies
in MacOS X, if you can, so that you can take full advantage their
capabilities instead of running them in last century's operating
system.
The $599 20-pack
offer expires at the end of November, or "while supplies last".
If you're a school, you might want to pounce on this. If you're
not, you might want to congratulate Apple for getting serious about
loading up schools with Mac desktops, and not just laptops. As
the subject of the email I received from Apple said, "Upgrade
your whole school".
And oh yeah,
billpalmer.net/educators is alive again, so if you have contributions
of any kind, feel free to send them in to billpalmer@mac.com.
Remember, we're all in this together.
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