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C+ For Effort; Try Harder (8/21/00)
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Maybe it's just us, but frankly, we kind of wish that Apple would stop issuing those annual big-convention press releases stating that "Apple is still number one in the education market." Why? Because the energy the company would save by not repeating that fact might be just enough energy to get Apple acting like the best again. Don't get us wrong-- we're not knocking the Apple Store for Education, or the Apple Learning Solutions, or any of that stuff; it's just that the anecdotal evidence that doesn't come from Apple always seems to indicate that the Mac platform still has a tough fight ahead in the schools.
Case in point: the latest disturbing news from former Mac stalwart Dartmouth College. According to an article in the school's newspaper that got picked up on U-WIRE, "for the first time ever," the majority of the incoming Class of 2004 will be using Windows instead of Macs. Now, it's possible that all we're seeing is the delayed effect of the "Apple's going under any minute now" press of 1996 and 1997, during which everyone in Dartmouth's Class of 2004 was back in high school, and Apple's utter inability to compete on the beige box-makers' home turf (price and game selection, sans style) probably ceded vast chunks of the home market to Wintel. Since Dartmouth's incoming freshpersons were advised to bring "whatever machine they were more comfortable with," having undoubtedly spent the past four years on a PC, the majority of the class opted for Windows. Sad, but (probably) true.
There's another possible explanation for the change, though; last year marked the first time that the school didn't explicitly recommend that everyone in the incoming class buy a Mac. Who knew the students were listening? Here we figured that everyone had attention spans as blissfully short as ours, but evidently evolution's still debating whether "not listening" could be a positive genetic mutation. Wait, what were we talking about again? Oh, yeah. In any case, isn't it "interesting" that the Mac-to-PC shift among the incoming frosh comes just one year after Dartmouth accepted and installed $450,000 worth of free Windows systems? Okay, so maybe it's not quite as dramatic as the Yalegate scandal, but it's still kinda noteworthy. Our question is, when will Apple return to its primordial roots and start chucking free gear at the schools again?
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SceneLink (2495)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 8/21/00 episode: August 21, 2000: Not satisfied with trading in a Twentieth Anniversary Mac for a new G4? Then throw your old PowerBook 5300 into the deal as well and get a cheap Pismo while you're at it. Meanwhile, Dartmouth College reports that for the first time ever, the incoming class is using more PCs than Macs, and a Microsoft bigwig is selling off a lot of MSFT shares; is an acquisition in the cards, or is this purely a vote of no confidence?...
Other scenes from that episode: 2494: Wanted: 5300, Dead Or Alive (8/21/00) Wouldn't you know it? Mere moments after we introduced what we hoped would be a delightfully wacky and subversive mental image (Steve Jobs recalling defective Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh units just so he could smash them to bits with a heavy blunt instrument), word came down that the whole "recall for mass destruction" concept isn't all that deranged after all... 2496: The Great Stock Selloff II (8/21/00) Think back a few years, when Steve Jobs had just engineered Gilbert Amelio's "sudden departure" from Apple and started acting as "interim CEO" of the company. Do you recall the smell of distrust hanging heavy in the air wherever Mac users gathered for moral support?...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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