“In a stunning change of course, Henrico County’s School Board voted last night to distribute Dell computers to every high school student and teacher next year,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports. “The unanimous vote to broker a deal with Dell Inc. represents a victory for the Round Rock, Texas-based company in its battle with Apple Computers Inc. for superiority in the fast-growing education technology market.”
“Four years ago, Apple and Henrico struck a deal that drew national attention for being one of the first initiatives to give every middle and high school student a laptop,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: These people are about to learn a bunch of important lessons. Bad decisions have consequences. Too bad for the students, but they’ll be learning something, too. What a step backwards! So, now Henrico will have Windows XP where they could’ve had Mac OS X Tiger. Think about that for a moment. Wow. It’s not the hardware, Henrico folks. All personal computers and operating systems are not the same. Oh, never mind, you’ll learn soon enough. Wonder if we’ll ever know if things are going badly for Henrico or will it just be swept under the rug?
Apple’s “Profile in Success – Henrico County Public Schools” webpages are currently still online here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Cobb County school board approves Apple Mac plan; could eventually distribute 63,000 iBooks – 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
scrap the whole laptop program and invest the money into something that will be a little more useful to the kids. Seriously, how much do the kids need a laptop in the first place.
Is it to provide a technological education? Most of the kids are already able to use a computer better than their parents and teachers. If they need a technological education, take a class for that.
Is it the software that’s providing the superior education? Hardly. Software is just another means to do what the teachers should be doing in the first place.
Is it to teach concepts that they will face in the real world? No because success in the real world isn’t based on how well a person can master technology. Technology is a tool, and it’s constantly changing. A person isn’t going to succeed because they know how to run a specific program or because they can avoid spam and spyware. A person’s success is going to be based on skills that don’t need to be taught using technology.
If they are going to use technology, they might as well use Apple, but they should really first consider how they are using the money in the first place.
Typical government stupidity. They didn’t even have enough common sense to wait a couple of days to checkout and understand what an immense benefit Tiger would be to any computer user. Now they’ll have to hire IT people by the dozen. Check the bank accounts of the dummies who voted. It isn’t their money they’ve piddled away it’s yours and mine. No-one will ever be accountable for costs involved. If anything is found to be under the table in this deal, the perps will get a raise. Typical government. AAAARRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
Greg & Zupchuck,
What the kids need to learn for the business world is how to use a spreadsheet, a word processor, a presentation program, how to edit and insert multimedia data, and transfer and manipulate files. Those operations are NOT OS specific. If you’re suggesting that they need to learn to fix their own OS when it is corrupted by malware or crashes of its own weight then you’re sadly mistaken. The assumption that anyone, the business world included will put up with the present state of Windows for the next 5 years is seriously flawed.
It’s not like it matters. With our education system going down the toilet and the better jobs starting to be shipped overseas to places like Singapore, these kids won’t need to know how to use a computer in their jobs stocking shelves at Walmart. In a more advanced career path, they might need to know how to press the cheeseburger and fries combo meal symbol on the cash register or set the automated timer on the tater tot deep fryer, but that will be the extent of their needed computer knowledge.
Believe me, we’re wholesaling our children’s education in many more ways than choosing Windows machines over Macs.
You guys are completely anal, If thats what they choose, thats what they choose. Windows Based systems arent nearly as hard to manage as most of you so ignorantly agree.
600+ systems, not a single virus reported in 3 years.
Oh and one more thing, the most obvious reason they went with dell is on price. Apple still charges an arm and a leg for shit thats obsolete in a year.
Greg, you just don’t get it. computers are tools. This debacle is akin to giving the kids in woodshop (not that they have that class any more, it’s ‘how to understand your feelings now’), any way it’s like giving the kids a saw with blunt teeth to do woodwork, they’ll spend all the time sharpening the saw , rather than making the furniture. I took carpentry 60 years ago and now am a master sculptor and carver. Just love my powerbook (and President Bush) So there!
not that I am defending the actions by these public school officials..it’s just that I work in the public sector and have been for the past 15 years. With that been said, public sectors, be it school, transportation,police, etc all look at the bottom dollar..These entities are very short sighted and carry a very conservative way of thinking..This IMO explains why this school district went Dell/XP…Dell, really must have lowered the bid, to have won this agreement. I can only hope that the kids are not affected and that despite all the issues surrounding winduxs — they can effeciently study and be productive…After all it’s about the kids. (not the stupid education committee)
my two cents.
Re:
“A Couple of Telling Observations”, indeed… so easy, isn’t it? To believe bulls**t about people you don’t know? Anonymous posts
are safe for you, aren’t they? That way, you can be whomever, and nobody can see the little logos on the shirts your mom bought you, or your little P2P’d collection of complaint rock from Lilith Fair. Stop ragging on people you don’t know. You sound like an idiot.
I know the area and know people who live and have lived there. The county is hollywood central casting for the suburban American led-by-the-marketing-nose ‘culture’. RINOs (Republicans In Name Only). Live one way while espousing a different view. Want a car/watch/clothes/etc because it’s what everybody else wants or is getting. They don’t trust their own eyes/ears/heart/mind because they have been raised on too much TV and mass-market BS.
No wonder the parents were concerned that they were not using PCs. Now they will and countless hours of previously productive time will be spent maintaining an operating system rather than using applications toward a productive end.
BTW- There is no logo on my shirt, not one P2P song resides on any of my computers or iPod and I do know the area and people. 95% of them cannot tell you who their US Representative and Senators are if you offered them a million $ for the correct answer, but can tell you who Tom Cruise’s new GF is. This despite the fact that they pay half or more of their income in taxes, we are at war and are running 1/2 Trillion $ defecits as far as the eye can see. Now they have Dell laptops so they can be ‘normal’ just like everybody else. America used to be about individuality– not conformity.
I hope those kids lock the admin’s out of those machines, wipe them, and install some Linux variant on them. We all know they’re capable of it, too. Heh! 😀
I’ve seen Wintel laptop maintenance in several schools and it consists of re-imaging the hard disk. That’s it, no attempt to save any data. The technician (usually an over worked person in the office or library) will just erase and reinstall the standard load of software that the school contract specifies. It assumes that all the student’s work is resident on the school’s servers. When the students are at school they’re probability safe but then again when the laptops come home for the evening or the weekend and the student connects to the internet… Well we all know how long it takes for bad things to happen to even the best students.
BTW: most of those “re-imaged” hard drives were chalked up to the general term “software failure”, virus were almost never listed as a problem.
How many of those 600 + systems leave the premises every day?
also, me thinks that since Tiger is not compatible with .Mac’s Virex…this was what killed the deal..being that windows users are use to have virus protection…
Does anyone have any details from the press conference?? It was suppose to happen at 9am. I know I have a slew of questions including, why the deal with Dell is for only 15,800, when the original Apple deal was for around 23,000 laptops. Did they loose that many students and or teachers during the last 4 years?
Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see if they bring out that same old tired argument “PCs are what’s used in the business world”.
I thought schools were suppose to promote intelligence, not stupidity.
Guess Henrico is going to the “school of hard knocks”.
Greg,
You are an idiot. The best thing the schools can do is train these kids on Macs. Windblows is easy to figure out. At least the kids will all be exposed to the greatness of OS X and use it in their businesses down the road like I do. With your idiotic rationale I would never have been exposed to Macs and not known that there is a much better way. And they work great in business. I have over 100 networked macs in my high end constrution business and never, ever, have problems. The Windblows systems always are having problems with viruses and more work to maintain. Not fun to use either. Greg you are a tool.
Greg, not only are you a moron, but also an uninformed moron.
1. Virsues come from a variety of sources, not just mail.
2. Windows vXX, x.x or whatever is a operating system that will not make it to 2010.
3. Longhorn, Microsoft’s great savior is in serious trouble.
4. Dell, Gateway, HP, IBM and all the other INTEL sheep have no idea how to build a box and OS together. IBM’s one venture into this space with OS/2 and OS/2 WARP was a miserable failure.
5. The morons in Henrico County have done no analysis on TCO, tech support or student productivity.
At the end of the day, children are in school to learn the skills, not repair their computers or fight with the damn operating system. This is the key to Apple Research and Development. The job is not to supply another computer, but rather a computer that allows people to be productive during their entire work day. I use a Mac and have for the last 12 years, after growing up in your so-called mainstream PC world. Windows SUCKS….. that’s the bottom line. I no longer reboot my system, lose updates and changes or work longer hours because the f’in system crashed. My Mac is almost never turned off and only re-booted once a week for maintenance reasons.
Try that with a freaking PC running WINDOWS. You and the thousands of sheep that follow the windows platform just have NO CLUE!
Message for Greg,
The idea behind school laptop programs is to further the education of our children. Read: NOT to learn an OS.
It doesn’t matter which OS dominates the business world because our children will eventually use much different computers when they join the workforce.
What does matter is the students ability to use the computer as a tool. When the OS is plagued by security issues, it diminishes it’s usefulness in an education environment. As an education tool, the clear choice is Apple.
I believe this is really based on a huge problem that Apple Education still faces. Most Mac advocates would be amazed at how many schools are still in the realm of OS 9. It’s completely nuts but it is true. They have software that still runs in 9 and the companies are defunct and or are no longer developing stuff for the Mac at all. The other problem is that many very popular software and server-based products in schools are just now releasing X versions and they are wrought with problems.
I am not completely in the know but I did know that Henrico officials were very reticent to move to OS X about a year ago. I had some dealings with the district and I was shocked to learn that they were still using OS 9 at the time. I know a lot of school districts that have abandoned Apple because of OS X migration. The IT idiots use the arguments of “…if you’re migrating you might as well move to XP.” The very fac that this happened is horrible and causes my blood to boil. I really feel for the kids and teachers in this deal. The road ahead is going to be a very bumpy one indeed.
Does any one at Apple, who reads this list know the installed base of schools that are still stuck using OS 9? My guess is that it’s still above 40 or even 50%.
Let’s hope Apple continues to help districts migrate to OS X that are still hanging on in the OS 9 world.
JEB
Dell is desperate. That’s the bottom line.
In other news, another school district just signed up for 63,000 iBooks!
In any case, if you WERE interested in teaching them about the operating system, they’re more likely to understand how Longhorn will work by using Tiger now. Microsoft’s future moves will always resemble Apple’s present.
Wasn’t so long ago computer science classes were teaching MS-DOS because although mice and folders and little 3.5 inch disks were nice, it seemed clear that when these people graduated they’d wouldn’t have those things, they’d be using “IBM-compatible” stuff in 90% of businesses….
Some PC people just can’t see “a computer as a tool” argument, which is amazing. A computer is just an object that you use to achieve results. Some results are better achieved with different tools. If Greg had argued that some companies use softwares available only on Windows, I’d give him his point then and agree that Macs are not for everyone (though, how many Windows-only business softwares used by students? A lot of them only use Office, email, web browsers). His argument on preparing students for “real world” is rather weak. Desktop metaphore has been around for a long time and the basics have not changed significantly. You also need to learn once about the difference in things like how to set up a firewall. And as for learning the pitfalls on Windows, if Microsoft has not fix them in 5 years, is this the kind of OS you want to rely on? If Microsoft fixes them, what you learn is not applicable then.
He also ignores the fact that most Mac users are also capable Windows users. Knowing Macs do not prevent people from learning Windows, just as knowing English does not prevent you from learning French. However, it’s amazing how many Windows users are ignorant of other platforms. If anything, Window shuts people’s mind. Is it any wonder it attracts like-minded people, like those CTOs and IT people who can’t see past their own interests, who make decisions without proper studies, TCO analysis, etc..
Windows fanatics are like people who will teach students how to use only hammers because hammers are so great and used all over the “real” world and everyone knows how to use hammers. Want to sculpt a statue? Use only hammers. The TV is broken? A hammer will fix that.
This can be used to the Mac communities advantage. We need to document quickly how much time, effort, and money that Henreco has expended with the Mac program. In 4 yrs we should be able to paint a technocolor image of devistation caused by this screwup. Accountablity folks. Shine the light.
The arguments about needing training on the Windows environment holds little water.
My first computer was a TRS-80 that used a cassette for storage. I then moved up to a 64 KB dual 5 1/4″ floppy IBM PC.
At that point in time, the PC industry was just starting and I knew DOS 1.0 inside out and sideways.
The background info is relavant to the idea that the government was going to REQUIRE learning BASIC programming as part of the school curriculum. By the time it went through the various committees, programmers had moved from BASIC to C and the idea of teaching programming had been dropped.
Education should be to teach people how to learn not what to learn. And computer use is a skill, regardless of the OS.
No monuments were ever built for a commitee…
What do you think they drive? A yugo…….if THEY (The educated-used loosely) would only think of the computers as if it was their car…..Will I make it to work today???!!!
The mechanics’ are going on a very loooooong vaction to Europe soon!