“Just as panicked iBook buyers flooded through the gates, county offices have been flooded with complaints,” WRIC-TV reports. “County Manger Virgil Hazelett tells us Tuesday alone his office received up to 100 phone calls. ‘We’re very concerned and very apologetic for anyone who was in that crowd who became nervous or of course were pushed about and so forth,’ says Hazelett.”
WRIC reports, “Hazelett tells me county officials are trying to respond to every complaint. And he wants the public to know they are also upset and thankful no one was, in their opinion, seriously hurt. ‘I very honestly would not do it in this manner, there are any number of alternatives that we can consider in the future,’ he says.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: In the future? Dude, your school system has switched to Dell. Do you honestly think people will be peeing themselves for four-year-old Dells running Microsoft’s porous Windows XP? Oh right, sorry, forgot who we were talking about, you (and a handful of other Henrico dullards) probably do think such a thing is possible.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Woman wets herself to keep place in line for $50 Apple iBooks – August 16, 2005
Apple continues to lead in customer satisfaction, Dell loses more ground – August 16, 2005
Henrico citizens stampede for $50 Apple iBooks – August 16, 2005
Henrico closes $50 Apple iBook sale to general public; only Henrico residents can buy – August 03, 2005
Henrico moves $50 Apple iBook sale to Richmond International Raceway due overwhelming demand – July 28, 2005
Apple announces 30,000 iBooks deal with Florida’s Broward County Public Schools – July 27, 2005
Henrico residents object to public sale of Apple iBooks – July 26, 2005
Henrico County Public Schools to sell Apple 12-inch iBooks for $50 each on August 9th – July 25, 2005
Henrico blasted for choosing Dell laptops with Windows XP over Apple iBooks with Mac OS X Tiger – May 09, 2005
Henrico school officials on Apple to Dell switch: The logo will change, but the tool is the same – April 30, 2005
Henrico school board dumps Apple Macs, picks Dells with Windows – April 29, 2005
Henrico County Apple iBook plan in jeopardy? – April 02, 2005
Survey shows support for Henrico iBook program with ‘lukewarm support’ for Apple’s Mac OS X – March 07, 2005
Henrico poll finds students are using iBooks successfully – February 11, 2005
Henrico iBooks raise concerns among some parents – May 28, 2004
Henrico high school laptop program to continue, but will it still feature Apple Macs? – February 24, 2005
More schools experience Windows virus, worm problems while Macs just keep working – August 22, 2003
A tale of two school systems: Windows schools crippled while Mac schools unaffected – August 21, 2003
I think people would buy $50 dells. They don’t care, just want a deal.
Dude, you gotta Dell – YUCK!
Good take MDN!
Magic Word: left – these Dells will be left for the binmen!
the real apology should be to the teachers and students for pushing the virus-spyware-malware alliance of Windows onto them and forcing them to become Windows technicians instead of spending their time learning about Math, Science, and language.
DudeMac –
Alomst sounds like getting an STD!
Lesson from this fiasco: Don’t get in the way of obese black women and their “bargains”
For $50.00? Yeah, sadly people will stand in line for those too. The 1,000 they sold were reported to be the ones that the system had the most difficulties with. That was ran locally in the paper and was common knowledge. The fact that the parts were worth more than $50.00 justified the desire to have one.
“County Man[a]ger Virgil Hazelett tells us Tuesday alone his office received up to 100 phone calls. ‘We’re very concerned and very apologetic for anyone who was in that crowd … there are any number of alternatives that we can consider in the future,’ he says.”
MDN is right.
Hey Virgil, nobody is going to want a 4 year old Dell P.O.S. when it comes time for you to get rid of them, so don’t sweat it.
What the ‘public officials’ in Henrico County should have realized is that: 1) Apple’s iPod is one of the ( if not THE) most popular consumer electronics device in the country and that 2) there are many people that would be willing to shank their grandmother (not that any of us would want THAT to happen) for a $50 Apple iBook.
How out of touch with reality are these guys???
Hey Virgil, nobody, I repeat, NOBODY is going to give a crap about a 4 year old Dell laptop when it comes time for Henrico County to unload those, so relax. One of your ‘alternatives’ would be to write them off the books and send them to the local landfill. That would be the best use for them.
The point is that when the Dell’s they just bought are 4 years old, they won’t be selling them to anyone because they won’t actually WORK anymore by that time. So no, there won’t be any repeat stampede in Henrico County in 2009…
MDN,
Yes, I actually do think folks would have clammoured for 4yr-old Dells if they had been offered. There are a lot of people in the surrounding area which could not afford a new iBook or Dell. The video clips of the people who were there could have clued you in. The $50 price would be attractive to quite a few low-income folks who otherwise would not have a computer in their homes.
Stop being a dullard yourself and consider the fact that not everyone can afford new computer regardless of the how inexpensive it is.
Your ignorance and racism is a shining example to us all.
Um, They have another batch of 1000 iBooks to sell…
But last week I was saying the same thing – no one is going to riot for a $50 Dell/XP.
Additionally, 20 folks returned from the iBook riot to find their cars had been towed and were forced to pay $180 to get them back.
Police had only authorized one car to be towed because it was blocking a fire hydrant.
Typical.
link
Lots of interesting letters to the Editor in the times dispatch too.
link
Also a funny cartoon:
link
I had a Dell notebook and it was a piece of crap. Talk about cheap. The screen wasn’t very good (although new ones are much better), the power management features did not work well, oh the spyware, the flimsy keyboard broke, and the joystick would get stock so the mouse pointer would run off the screen.
Unless I’m forced by management I will not get another Dell.
apologize to the taxpayer! Why did they sell them for 25% market value? THATS why there was a stampede. If they asked for $100- they would have sold them all, made more money AND avoided a riot.
…that the same people who:
1- Cried that they wanted M$ Office were too stupid to order it in the first place. The iBooks could have been purchased with Office.
2- Decided to replace Macs with XP Dells because they were concerned that their children would be hurt by not having the ‘experience’ of using a Windoze machine.
3-Decided to sell these machines for a VERY SMALL FRACTION of their value. Here is a link to eBay prices for 800mHz G3 iBooks
http://search.ebay.com/apple-ibook-g3_W0QQfclZ4QQfnuZ1QQfsooZ2QQfsopZ3
Given all that-
Why would you expect them to be able to conduct a simple sale without it looking like a casting call for the Jerry Springer Show?
Hey, I’ll buy a Dell for $50 in four years – I can probably get OSX working on it by then!
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Or, barring that, it would make a good Linux machine.
The real issue is that the school board had absolutely no clue what they were doing, by pulling a bait and switch from everyones welcome to just county residents are welcome and deciding that 6 off duty cops would be enough crowd control they put everyones life at risk. The choice of venue was a textbook example of how to cause a riot.
1. Restrict access
2. Have an agitated over heated underinformed crowd restless from camping out for 6 hours in spite of a poorly enforced no camping rule.
3. Open without adequate security
4. Offer useful consumer electronics for an insane price to the first 1000 that cross the finish line.
The county should have raffled them off,
or donated them to people on welfare or something other than say
“here are those laptops, dont kill each other too much getting them”
“Who’d a thunk?,
3-Decided to sell these machines for a VERY SMALL FRACTION of their value. Here is a link to eBay prices for 800mHz G3 iBooks”
only one problem with that search…. they are 500 MHz iBooks the they are selling. Fact check before running off at the mouth.
http://www.henrico.k12.va.us/ibooksale/
But the Dude does agree…. they should have sold for 100.00 and it still would have been a sell out crowd.
The Dude abides.
I don’t understand why they didn’t just have an auction.
The real sadness of the Henrico County experience is that county officials greatly underestimated the value of 4 year old iBooks.
They sold 1,000 iBooks and received $50,000 (before expenses). My guess is that they could have got $150 just as easily.
A price of $150 would have resulted in one, possibly two, positive scenarios for the District.
First they would have grossed 3X as much ($150,000 vs $50,000).
Second, being aware of the higher resale value for Apple iBooks, the District could have easily justified spending a little more for new iBooks, benefitting the District and students alike with a superior product.
The $50,000 Henrico County received for the iBooks (and then some) may disappear overnight should one of the injured people choose to sue.
Two words – personal responsibility. People need to start caring about how their actions impact others and act with courtesy and compassion. If they did then they wouldn’t run red lights and endanger other people or create the mob scene at the Henrico iBook sale.
A small percentage of those people acted like greedy animals going after a AYCE buffet and endangered/injured others. Unbelievable.
The iBooks include Airport cards (802.11b). ISTR Apple’s service part cost (no longer a retail item) is $129. Yet another reason why these were grossly under-priced.
Also, The riot occurred when the outside gates were opened. Then the crowd lined up again and the (new) first 1,000 were given numbers. Why weren’t the numbers passed out to the outside line first? That surely would have avoided the riot.
Also, those iBooks run faster with OS X 10.4 Tiger, provided they have sufficent (cheap!) RAM. How much better did XP run on 4-year-old Dell laptops when that OS was released? Ha!
I think the dick that wrote the MacDaily News’ take on this article is a moron, people would defintely buy a $50 Dell, Gateway, e-machines, and apparently even apple laptops any day. And the comments about Henrico County residents is a low blow from someone who spends their time surfing the internet all day, tailing off other peoples stories. Do some work yourself, write your own articles. MacDaily News BLOWS ME! I am starting an anti-apple, and anti MacDaily News campaign starting today. I guess I’ll see ya when I see ya!
The new podcast “This week in Tech” (TWIT) is out, and it includes a discussion titled “Would 12,000 people riot for a $50 four-year-old Dell?”
Find it here [iTMS]: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73329404
TWIT website here: http://www.twit.tv/
Thanks Angus,
That’s hilarious. Btw, TWIT features the inimitable John Dvorak and Leo Laporte (among others.)
The iBook section starts at around 14:00 into the podcast.
After the decison from the Henrico County School Board to switch from Apple to Dell, I wrote the them with my opinion that they were making a mistake (Apple has llower total cost of ownership, far less problems with viruses and spyware, and better parental controls. Below is the response I got. Any suggestions on how to respond to Stuart’s non-response?
Magic Word: returned
StuMyers@aol.com wrote:
This is a response from just one board member from Henrico County, not an official response from the board or the school system. I’ve got a few questions for you since you seem to be an expert on what we should have done:
Do you have any of the details on the contracts we have had over the past four years for laptops, servers in schools, and servers at our central office? Have you successfully implemented a network spread over 68 campuses over a 200 square mile area and included 30,000 computers from several different manufacturers?
Do you know any of the details regarding service issues, warranty coverage, insurance premiums, how many Dell machines are in use in the system, how many Apple machines are in use in the school system, or what level of support we have received from various vendors including Apple and Dell? How about how we use them? What do you know about how our faculty members use the machines? Do you know how our tech center students use computers? How about our TV production facilities? What do you know about our Center for Communications and how our students use computers there? How about computer use at our Center for Engineering?
Did you see the proposals submitted in response to our RFP? Do you know the details of each proposal? Do you know that price represented only a small part of the overall evaluation? Do you know the rationale behind the recommendations from the evaluation committee? Do you know what questions were asked by the school board? How about what our professional teaching staff said? How many computers will still be in use in Henrico that are not affected by this lease? How many Apple computers will still be in use? What will we be the uses for those computers?
I can only make a wild guess about your answers. So, without all that information, how can you offer an intelligent opinion? Sure, you can offer your opinions about the two vendors, but without the details, you can’t make a reasonable decision for a school system. Thanks for your comments, but they address just a part of a much larger picture. Tell your buddies at Apple we will still have more Apple machines than Dell machines in Henrico County. We always have. It was one request for proposals with one vendor getting an order. It was not a sweping replacemnt of all Apples with Dells. We didn’t make an uninformed, hasty, price-only decision. I was on this board when we initially leased Apples for our secondary students. That was the right decision when we made it four years ago. The most recent decision was also the right one. Thanks for your concern for our well being.
Stuart Myers
So basically totally sidestepped the issue, not even providing one nugget as to why “the most recent decision was also the right one.”
Maybe a reply should include twice as many questions back to him, such as “Do you know what the reduction of IT costs are for fully Apple-powered organizations?”
How about, “Do you know what the value of those iBooks are that were sold to the mob for $50?”
“Do you know how many viruses and spyware affect schoolchildren’s Dell laptops nationwide?”
The head of Intel remarked in a recent press conference that he spends over an hour each weekend cleaning out the spyware junk from his daughter’s computer.
“Are you aware the amount of time each week Henrico parents must spend cleaning out viruses and spyware from their student’s Dell laptops?”
Prediction: In 4 years’ time, the dell laptop would sell at $50. Only a handful of crowds turn up. And it takes 2 months for them to clear the stocks.
County Manger reports: It is nice and easy for us this time, compared to the event that happened in August 2005.
“Your ignorance and racism is a shining example to us all.”
Please look in a hard-backed dictionary for the word “racism”, 99.99% of people don’t know the correct definition of racism. Mistakenly they think it’s anything stated negatively about another race. Now restate your comment perhaps…
There are two parts of the racism definition, the first part denotes the use of race as a way to determine characteristics, the second part is the negative and derogatory use of such a method.
“Dear Stuart,
Could you explain the shift which made one laptop platform the right decision 5 years ago, and another one now? The mac platform has transformed dramatically in the past 4 years.
Do you honestly think people will be peeing themselves for four-year-old Dells running Microsoft’s porous Windows XP?
Yes, people would line up to buy a four year old, $50 Dell… All four of them.
There would be no mob, no injuries, and no pants wetting.
I guess this fact just proves that they should have used Dells from the beginning!
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You mac people have all your shit shoved way too far up your asses. Your obsessed as hell about your little mac world that only you live in. Its like a colt, yall need help
this whole damn site is soo full of bullshit it is just funny as hell u are such computer dorks thats just it , not all of u some of u are normal, but some of yall are freaks. I bet u buy macs so u can look at porn all day and never worry about a virus cause u dont have girlfriends, or lives or nothn lol. GEt a life