“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
It’s great! Fantastic! What a coup by Dell!
Now the whole world will see the quality inherent in every Dell laptop and in Windows XP!
*cough cough*
I don’t think that we’ll have to wait a year to hear about what’s happening with this program. By the time, say, October or November rolls around, we’ll be seeing stories about how big of a mistake this was.
Greg and others of his mindset are the types who drive most of these kind of short-sighted decisions in Big Education. I’ve consulted with K-12 and university clients alike on IT issues for the last 20 years and you would be aghast at how prevalent the mindset is.
At that bastion of “progressive” thinking, the University of California, XX (the specific school shall remain nameless), I saw first hand how difficult it is to get the whole notion of TCO across to even the most self-styled “platform agnostic” IT administrators. The really sad thing at UCXX and other institutions, both of lower and higher “learning, is that IT support sucks money away from critical educational functions. When it comes down to it, an IT support tech costs about the same (and often more) than a junior faculty member. However, the Windows support faction in educational IT cares nothing about that little fact. The JOB is much more important than whether the school has the resources to teach the students.
The next time you hear whining about the student-to-teacher ratio in a school check to see if they are running Windows or OS X. There will be PC techs running all over a Windows centric district while those with OS X will typically rely on a single Mac loving teacher to keep their loaner laptops running. At UCXX there is 1 OS X tech for every 3 or 4 PC techs on campus (while the split between Macs and PC boxes on campus is roughly 50/50!). I ran the numbers just last year at this university and found that they were wasting over $2 Million per year in labor costs by choosing to run, in those places where they didn’t need to, Windows instead of OSX. In fact, I found that we could have given every faculty and staff person at the school a brand new Mac every year for what they were spending on excess Windows techs.
At the end of the day, the notion that the students are “learning the negatives of Windows” by being forced to use it is delusional thinking. The kids don’t do the virus disinfections or reinstalls any more than the cubical shlub in your average office building does his own sys admin work. It is the IT people do the under-the-hood work in education just like they do in business.
Bottom line, hard/software; cheap, people; expensive. This is axiomatic. If the school board chose Dell because they thought they would save money then they are simpletons and way behind the curve. Just like at UCXX where students are buying new Powerbooks by the hundreds while the IT department is pushing PCs, school districts around the country are completely out of touch with where computing is going. Who knows, by the time a 7th grader graduates from college the tables may have turned. Microsoft could be the one with the 10% market penetration while Apple has the 85%. It could happen.
-B
From experience, Dell laptops are heavier than breeze blocks. Have they factored in that the kids aren’t going to have the strength to carry these things around?
If anyone wants to make a quick buck, over at Henrico they need 15,800 trolleys fast.
Ok.. people from what I’m seeing as of now, everyone is satisfied with dells. apples suck ass big time. can’t print at home.. cuz most people have pc’s at home. Also, most programs used to get rid of spyware are free. http://www.downloads.com… hello. dell=14 inch screen apple= 12 inch screen. sorry but apple is piece of shit.
and did anyone consider the option of simply system restore? Which apple doesn’t have sadly.
Well, if they really wanted to increase productivity they would use Linux
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”raspberry” style=”border:0;” /> heh. (Could imagine all the tech support needed for that lol)
But in all seriousness, most of the business world uses windows on their workstations and the microsoft variety of software, such as Office(tho you can get that on macs, I know). But to truely prepare them for the business world of tomorrow, it makes sense to be using windows. When I went to highschool(oh not so long ago), we used a mixture of macs/pcs for a variety of applications that you would find them in the real world. For video, art-design, and music editing we used Macs while on the other hand for office work and office-design, we used windows. I think that is a common trend throughout the business world. I, as a home user, use Linux and Windows because in all reality, the OS doesn’t matter… its what you produce with it.
-Pyked
People deserve good life time and loans or just commercial loan can make it better. Just because people’s freedom bases on money state.