“A few days ago, I read that Apple is supplying 30,000 iBooks, the company’s consumer-level laptop computer, to the Broward County public school system in Florida’s Fort Lauderdale area,” Al Fasoldt writes for The Syracuse Post-Standard in an article entitled, “Wake up and try an Apple! It’s safer.” “A day later, an upset parent showed me a note from a Central New York college official discouraging the use of Macintoshes on campus.”
Here’s what the college official told the parents of a prospective student who wanted to bring her iBook to college:
“The problems a student will encounter using the Apple system are the result of incompatibility. Since none of the faculty in the business school (that I know of) use the Apple system, we really do not know the extent of the difficulties a student will encounter using an Apple. In her freshman year class she’ll be expected to use the classroom computer to create presentation visuals. Sometime students need to e-mail papers to professors or other students and not all such work can be interpreted by the Windows system.”
MacDailyNews Take: Obviously, if they are using an “Apple,” there might be problems, but if they’re using a Mac, trust us: email works, MS Office files are interchangeable between Mac and Windows, etc.
Fasoldt continues, “Windows is so pervasive that many of us, institutions and individuals alike, assign some sort of vital force to it. It doesn’t matter that Windows is badly designed from the standpoint of safety. All too often, the alternatives to Windows are simply dismissed. So what should Mac users do? Grin and bear it, maybe. Apple’s Mac sales are up by more than 30 percent, and many of those sales are going to former Windows users – maybe even in the offices of college officials.”
Full article, give Al the hits, here.
MacDailyNews Take: Compared to Apple’s Mac OS X, Windows is badly designed from the standpoint of usability, too.
Another learned idiot.
Go Orangemen?
What a twit that “Official” be.
If I might enquire .. how many of us in here already use PCs too and anyway? I myself don’t even know how to turn a PC on, let alone use one .. My point is that we all seem to act in here as if it were the case that most Mac users never used PCs. But I know better. Truth is, most Mac users also seem to have a PC hovering somewhere in the background for those times when it’s the only thing that will work. As I said, I don’t .. and the grim reality is that when push comes to shove .. I end up walking away from the task rather than temporarily walking away from Mac to briefly use a PC. But I’m betting that’s not the case for most folks posting here.
So, am I right? Or not? Just curious. You know, it’s going to be a noticably different Mac community and a noticably different Mac web once Mac market share climbs into significant double digits. I’m not clear how it will all pan out attitude wise, but I’m pretty sure that we current Mac fanatics (real or imagined) might continue to find ourselves in a similar minority to that which we have always known if we keep up with the ‘Mac is the only computer you should to own’ line of rhetoric. For me .. that part is true, but I strongly suspect it’s pretty much hot air from most other folks. But we’ll see, I guess.
The over educated pin head movement strikes again. Those who can do, those who can’t teach.
I want to know what college that was, maybe we should enlighten that official. I work for a college and we have macs in the art and science departments.
How can people be that stupid when it comes to technology? Do people really not understand that when a software company creates a product for multiple operating systems, the inforamtion to read the file is contained within the product – not the OS…
I hope that student told the offical to “stuff it”…
This Central New York college official needs to be hanged. Mac’s can’t send e-mail? FTF. How did he/she ever become a Central New York college official. I would like to have his or her name, so that I can properly vent…
I will say tho that in my experience some Microsoft Office materials such as Power Point Presentation can get messed up when you give one made on a Mac to a Windows User or visa versa. I think it might have to do with fonts or something. It is not totally unusable – things are just a little bit out of place usually and you can fix it pretty quickly. At any rate, what do you expect from a Microsoft product? I think they get screwed up sometimes just going from windoze computer to windoze computer too.
I had to give a copy of my presentation to my windoze using boss and the problem was easy to get around in my case. I just saved it as a PDF and the appearance was locked in.
The “college official” is most likely wrong, but possibly right. In any case, they obviously haven’t bothered to actually find out if there is a problem.
In “business school”, there are actually other applications that you may need to use besides e-mail, spreadsheet, and presentation software. I know that I used statistical software extensively for both my undergraduate degree and my MBA. Undergrad we used SAS, and in the New York University MBA program we used Minitab. Neither one has a Mac client or seems to have any support from the respective companies (maybe there is an open source port of the Linux SAS product, but I don’t know)
Just as the people on this and other Mac sites criticise anyone who makes blanket staetments about Macs not being compatible with Windows, it is just as stupid to tell someone that they will not have ANY problems with compatability.
Apple faces a real battle against the pinheads that write technology recommendations (and news stories) without doing any fact finding. If there are non-Mac compatible products used, tell people exactly what they are, how extensively they are used, and whether those applications are available in a university computer lab (as they inevitably are). Let the user make the choice of whether all the benefits of using a Mac are worth having to go to the computer lab every one in a while.
From the Mac side, don’t tell someone that they’ll never have a problem. It does more harm than good once that person actually does have problem. Then they will really be pissed
on your PowerPoint, have you set the DPI to 96? Try that next time you start building a presentation, and use Windows friendly fonts [I know they’re ugly, but what can you do]. Less work getting a presentation to work on Windows then…
I have been on the Mac platform since 1990, and prior to that used Apple an ][gs from 1986 to 1990 as my primary computer. I use XP and Win2k at work, because of the fiscal short-sightedness of one of my firm’s partners a few years back when it was time to replace the aging Macs the firm had previously used (they were all PPC603s running OS7 or OS8, I can’t recall which).
I always tell people that OSX and Windows allow you to do 85-90% of the same stuff, platform agnostic — it’s that 10-15% of software that is esoteric and platform specific (i.e. Visio, Logic, Minitab, Final Cut Pro, AutoCAD, etc.) that makes it hard for SOME users to switch.
And I’m fine with that — use the right tool for the right job, I always say. But if you’re just doing what 85-90% of all the users are doing (email, web, word processing, etc.), you might as well enjoy the experience!!
Macs are in so many more places than people think.
I had a PC, in fact, built several….. then I grew up and graduated to the Mac….
That famous Consumer Reporting magazine did an article on malware in their most recent edition. Apparently, some 20% of Macintosh users reported getting spyware or viruses.
Very interesting.
I’d love to see what OS theses folks were running (Classic or OS X, or Classic on OS X). I’d love to see what particular piece of malware they got.
Probably a Word macro virus intended for a Windows user. But that really isn’t an infection. We’re all exposed to pathogens and have them in our bodies, but we don’t necessarily get infected by them.
Sincere there were no details on which OSes the respondents were using many of the statistics quoted are rather meaningless. One that was interesting, though – 4% of the respondents reported getting infected 50 times or more!…
If any of that is true, then the student needs to shop for a different college. Can the quality of their education be any better than their computer advice? And if the professors are so stupid as to use Windoze computers en masse, do you really want them teaching you anything?
gwm,
I have probably never spent a total of 10 hours in my entire life on a pc/windows machine. I have used Macs since 1991 and have never had to use a pc. I have always been able to do what I need on the Mac. Drives my family and friends crazy when they whine and complain to me about their computer problems and expect me to know the answer and all I can tell them is “Buy a Mac and I’ll be able to help you.”
I can’t seem to get them to see why I use a Mac, they constantly are having problems but they still see me working along with almost no problems and they still can’t get it through their head that a Mac is better. Oh well maybe the day will come when they have finally had enough and come on over to our side.
You bring up an important point, one that I think the officials department or program should readily be able to answer with specifics. If they do utilize PC only software, that is a legit argument.
Recognizing that the Mac is more prevalent in academic settings than for the average public or business, they could easily have an actual tech person determine if there are actual incompatibility problems instead of a blanket “i can’t open Mac attachments”. In my experience, this is a file name problem that can easily be fixed, not an unsolvable problem or true incompatibility. I believe it’s also built upon experiences with OS 9, rather than actual problems with Macs running OS X.
In 6 years I have not had one single problem with compatibility in an academic environment. This is ridiculous FUD.
…from the school official, that is…
The safest approach would be to get a Mac then and VPC and XP Pro SP2.
I’ve done that on my PB because I have to demo an app that is only available on Windows. (I also have a copy of Visio that I use infrequently.) There have been some significant speed gains in VPC since I started using it 3+ years ago and hopefully MS will continue to improve it – like letting you set more than 516 MB for memory.
The use of VPC takes care of the Windows specific software and the education discount should make it reasonable. The benefit of using the Mac for most students is that it offers more protection against malware.
As for the idiot who wrote the parents the letter – he or she peobably grew up in Cobb County . . .
I hate to say this, but this shows how IGNORANT and STUPID people can be. Clearly this parent has not the faintest grasp of how computer technology works.
Like it or not, this is how soooooo many people are. When I come across them, I try my best to educate them about the differences of Windows versus OS X as well as dispel this whole “incompatibility” myth that has plagues Macs for years.
This school “official” sounds like a co-worker of mine who once told me that Macs can’t handle digital photography.
I would like to tell this school official that my daughter has had zero compatibility issues with her iBook in her first 2 years at a central New York college.
Oh well.
As a small business owner I have to rely on a company to provide services for my final product. These are pcee guys and they don’t want to touch the mac platform. They seem to like the control and automation they can produce by creating active-x based programs. These programs work as mini applications through IE. Even the main website won’t allow me to browse thier Web based control panel. Because of this I think Apple needs to address workarounds for programmers using these types of tools and fast. What about the accounting software have any of you read the reviews to Quickbooks on version tracker, just about everyone pans it so I don’t how to invest my hard earned cash.
That said, I am IN bigtime and recommend the platform to just about anyone.