“Vijay Sonty loves Apple Computer laptops. The chief information officer of the Broward County Public School District, the nation’s fifth-largest with 270,000 students, just ordered 4,500 laptops for the upcoming school year. His purchase is part of an ongoing initiative geared to eventually give every high school student a notebook computer. That’s an extension of his strategy to put more Apples into classrooms. The district’s computers are 70% Apple and 30% Dell, but Sonty wants to move towards an all-Apple shop. “Apple technology is easier to use. There are fewer issues with the operating system. If you look at the price point, Apple is higher. But when you package everything, the total cost of ownership is lower,” says Sonty… Apple appears to have put itself in the sweet spot, as the desktop market continues to wither and the laptop market for K-12 starts to flourish,” Alex Salkever reports for BusinessWeek.
Full article here.
rock for apple
Yeeeeaaaaaahhhhh!!!
Yes, @ least there are still some people out there with brains and they actually using it!!
[B]Way to go Apple[/B]
Education is definitely the right way to go.
Educate them about the Mac while their minds are still open
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Yup. I bought an iBook, iPod MINI (Silver) and an iPod 20gb today. $1900 bucks with my education discount. Thanks Apple!
“The district’s computers are 70% Apple and 30% Dell, but Sonty wants to move towards an all-Apple shop. “Apple technology is easier to use. There are fewer issues with the operating system. If you look at the price point, Apple is higher. But when you package everything, the total cost of ownership is lower,” says Sonty”
Umm.. SONTY YOU ROCK! Way to see the deeper value in a stable OS that’s easy to use…
Now the kids can focus on exploring and learning rather than.. clicking checkboxes and reconfiguring just to start a program.
1st post of my own personal post! w00t!-
Hi I’m school girl paul, sure we all like to kid, but theres nothing funny about 1st posters. If you lock 256 monkeys in an office space with a typewriter for x amount of years they are bound to spell “firrst post!!! yehaaaaaawwwwwww” Studies show there is a steep rise in this monkey typing phenomena all around the world from WallWalla to Beirut. Infecting and cluttering up sites such as this one. Please be advise they are armed with poo and have no fear when publicly self courting (we are hoping soon enough they will loose all sight).
Thank you and have a good day,
School Girl Paul
Still waiting for CNET and other analysists to realize the long term pricing advantages of Apple. People less open minded than Sonty need to see these publications.
Quick Note: Apple has a buy-back program. Dell has a recycling program. Free removal of my old Dell? How could I resist?!!! lol…it makes so much sense it hurts.
find me any school board member who is willing to take an upfront cost hit and save years down the road. The PC manufacturers have it made in this respect… their lower initial costs dovetail nicely with the 20 nanosecond attention span of a politician.
It is nice to see an educated educator for a change. Rock On Sonty!!!!
Another nice aspect to this article is that it places the blame for Apple’s continuing challenges in the K-12 space squarely where it belongs: ignorant IT/”CIOs” who are only familiar with PCs.
Yup, it’s all about bureaucratic job protection, and in the tech arena the decisionmakers have even less confidence than usual in challenging their “experts.”
this is nothing but EXTREMELY good news for apple, get them started early and they will stick with it forever, epsecially when they try out virus/spyware/bluescreen of death land
It’s now time for the tech press, analysts and others to stop saying that “Apple lost the back-to-school selling season by delaying the iMac introduction”. Simply not true. WE know that K-12 are buying laptops (Apples and others) and students are also purchasing portables rather then desktops. iMacs remain a mostly home-based computer and one for small businesses. eMacs are the preferred desktop for K-12 school labs and other places where they are permamently ensconced rather then iBooks which are lent to students or put on carts for use in different locations within the school.
Re: jeff – shortsighted pennypinching politicians,
I’ve run into the same thing advising faculty and the powers-that-be when purchasing printers. The TCO of a simple B & W laser printer (approx $300 to buy) is far less than a <$100 inkjet printer. However our purchaser won’t/can’t buy the lasers. DUMB.