“An excited Claire S. Le Goues ’06 purchased the 12-inch, aluminum Macintosh (Mac) Powerbook computer using funds from her summer job. But Le Goues, a computer science major, didn’t earn the money for her new machine by slaving away at an investment banking firm or scooping ice cream for whiney children,” Matthew S. Lebowitz reports for The Harvard Crimson.
“Last summer, Le Goues made the 25-minute drive each day from her home in Cortlandt Manor, NY to a research lab in Hawthorne, NY, where she worked from nine to five as a programmer for International Business Machines (IBM). IBM is one of several producers of personal computers (PCs) that use the Microsoft Windows operating system. These Windows PCs are the main competition for Macs… it was the actions of a fellow IBM employee that finally convinced Le Goues to make the shift last summer,” Lebowitz reports. “One of her co-workers brought a Powerbook with him to work each day, insisting on using it for his work despite the fact that he was employed by the maker of a competing product. ‘I saw that level of devotion, and I was like, ‘Okay – that’s really convincing to me.””
Lebowitz reports, “Le Goues also says that Macs do not require the type of intense security measures that are necessary to protect a Windows PC. On a Windows PC, ‘You have to have all these spyware detectors and run an antivirus program every three days,’ she says. ‘It’s a lot of nonsense.’ She describes these measures as ‘voodoo’ and asserts that ‘there are no viruses for Macs.’ Evoking the image of a full-screen error message familiar to many PC users, she says, ‘There’s no blue screen of death on the Mac…It doesn’t freeze—nothing, it just works.'”
Lebowitz reports, “According to statistics obtained from Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences Computer Services (HASCS), only 32 percent of computers purchased by the Harvard community through the university’s discount computer purchase program this year were Macs—less than half of the number of Windows system purchases. However, Mac usage has been on the rise in recent years. Total purchases of Apple systems increased by 1 percent in Fiscal Year (FY) 2003, 11.9 percent in FY 2004, and 14 percent in FY 2005. A longitudinal examination of the current senior class further elucidates the rise in popularity of Macs among Harvard students. In the fall of their freshman year, only 9 percent of the class of 2005 owned Macs. But by this fall, that number had more than doubled, to 21 percent.”
Full article here.
What would you expect, from a girl.
First
21% installed base in the freshman class? 32% of University discount purchases? The article makes that sound paltry, but I think that sounds amazing! Apparently there’s strength in numbers!
Yay for them!
NoMacForYou,
I guess we couldn’t expect anything more intellegent from you….
NoMacForYou,
A “girl” Harvard student…
What they say about Mac users must be true… Higher intellegence and more disposable income.
Which is your excuse little “boy”?
IT departments hate this. The IT department at school and work are really suspicious of mac users. Anytime something goes wrong with the network at work…they always look at me with a suspecting eye. The fools don’t realize that I am the least likely person to bring in something that would cause damage.
Ignorant fools….
When they found out I was using my powerbook at work…the retard said..”we don’t support macs”…I said..that’s OK…I rarely have problems. An the ones I do have I can take care of in a few minutes.
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Quote:
“…only 32 percent of computers purchased by the Harvard community through the university’s discount computer purchase program this year were Macs—less than half of the number of Windows system purchases.”
*ONLY* 32%!!!
“However, Mac usage has been on the rise in recent years. Total purchases of Apple systems increased by 1 percent in Fiscal Year (FY) 2003, 11.9 percent in FY 2004, and 14 percent in FY 2005.”
This is significant.
“A longitudinal examination of the current senior class further elucidates the rise in popularity of Macs among Harvard students. In the fall of their freshman year, only 9 percent of the class of 2005 owned Macs. But by this fall, that number had more than doubled, to 21 percent.”
These are future leaders and trend setters.
“Le Goues says that Macs are also increasing in popularity among the people who actually have some relevant expertise—the students and staff of the computer science department.”
Again, the people who will make future buying decisions.
“Macs are completely compatible with Harvard’s wireless network and with pine, with Harvard FTP, with everything you’d need to use here…”
This is MAJOR! Pine is the university mainframe email system. FTP is the mainframe file transfer protocol. OSX makes using these Unix based mainframe services trivially easy.
noMacforyou’s just jealous because he can’t get none…
bawhahahhahaahahhaah
freebee:
when my IT said “we don’t support macs,” I use to tell them it is best reason for using a mac.
I run a PowerBook G4 seemlessly at work on a PC network. I print, share files, backup, and email. It took minutes to be up and running. The PC across the room is in constant need of updates. As far as support, I don’t need any.
Unix and OSX is beautiful.
Perhaps NoMacForYou is actually making an ironic statement about recent remarks from Harvard’s president that have ignited a huge controversy about women’s abilities in science.
But probably not.
I’m one of the lucky ones; my IT department is 99.44% pure (400 Mac clients, 15 XServers, and one PC that’s running something that only one department needs). Our IT department is 4 people:
Help Desk (non-technical)
Software Support (my job)
Hardware tech
Network/email admin
Even though we are 4 people for 400 users, we still have alot of free time (our Apple hardware guy has the highest load, go figure)
what exactly does “we don’t support macs” mean? Is it “don’t” or “won’t” or “don’t want to” or “can’t” or “don’t know how”?
I’ve never worked in IT but i imagine this is a scare tactic — like “don’t expect help if you have trouble with your machine …” Does this then mean that these IT people run around all day helping people with Word and Eudora. If so, then “support” is being used inappropriately because these programs and many others run very much the same way on Macs.
As an aside, i have not yet had a problem which did not get resolved by a quick trip to the Apple discussions board.
Zeke: “This is MAJOR! Pine is the university mainframe email system. FTP is the mainframe file transfer protocol.”
Hmm… ftp was a unix protocol (first appeared on BSD 4.2, according to man), which was ported to mainframe. Pine is a text based email client software from UW, which supports POP3 and IMAP. It runs on unix and other OS including Windows/DOS.
http://www.washington.edu/pine/
s:
Well put! “We don’t support” is used by hoards of IT departments worldwide as code for “We are ignorant of…”, “We are too lazy to…”, “We only operate within what out shallow University of Phoenix Windows training background permits”, and “We are incompetent boobs.” If I may, I’m going to use your comeback the next time I hear those magic words.
Looks like Havard people are actually smart!
In my last corporate job as a graphic designer, I insisted on them getting me a Mac. The IT department tried to talk me into a PC, but when I said it was a deal breaker, they agreed to get me one…with the “threat” that they wouldn’t be able to support it. The entire time I was there, I didn’t have to call them about a single issue…everything that came up I was able to take care of myself. I think the IT guys really hated me for that.
In Alberta, Canada, the average turkey farm raises more than 31,000 turkeys a year. I always find it amusing that most corporate IT departments that “don’t support Macintosh” need to hire, on average, one or more persons to maintain every five or six PCs, once you consider the number of turkeys the average Canadian farmer can keep alive and productive…
[BTW, in no way do I mean to disparage the entire Canadian poultry industry by comparing them to a typical corporate IT department. My apologies if I have offended any farmers.]
Doesn’t the author of this know that IBM hasn’t made personal computers for many years, and is not out of the business completely. The only personal computers using IBM processors are the Mac G5’s.
How long does it take for the word to get around?
“not” should be “now”
Hopefully Harvard is leading the charge. Tokyo University (the Japanese equivalent of Harvard) went for all Macintosh’s the spring of last year (that is school computers, not student owned ones, I don’t have the numbers on that). This could be a top of the pyramid moving on down trend.
Ahem:
“A longitudinal examination of the current senior class further elucidates the rise in popularity of Macs among Harvard students”
This is why I dropped out of Harvard. I don’t want to impress people with my degree or vocabulary built up by months of sweat equity of my nose buried in a dictionary.
What a bunch of putzs.
NoMacForYou,
I take exception to your statement…. you’re such a tool!
Marketa — NoMacForYou HAS no tool! That’s why he lashes out at women.
Jack A,
Don’t let anyone who went to Harvard hear you refer to another school as Harvard’s ‘equivalent’; Harvard students (and graduates) are the best, the brightest, and the most desirable people on the planet, and their s#%t smells like lavender or jasmine… If you don’t believe me, just ask one!!! hahaha!!
I was the sole support person for a school with around 100 Macs and 4 or 5 PCs. We never had trouble with the Macs. The handful of PCs kept me busy most of the time. They needed constant re-installs and configuring. Keeping them on the network and on the internet was nearly impossible. I could never get them to print reliably over the network. They could onlyh rarely access our email system. Ironically, when I left, the school was forced by the board to buy a room full of PCs to run the computer science program. I’ve learned that they can rarely get more than half of them running effectively at any one time. Not good for the program. Ha!