.......... the Devils Advocate.
I’ve spoken to folks here in education, they said that the Lakewood project was the basis of their decision.
http://www.cat.pinellas.k12.fl.us/They also said that Dell’s is making it easy for them to switch.
Similar to other business models, like printers, you sell the printer cheap and make your profits in ink. In the long run Dell cost more, in the short term budgets are satisfied. A kid can go to Walmart and buy a PC for $300.00 with peripherals and rebates, and, and....... seamlessly carry on the work from school then upgrade their computers as needed.
The iMacs that the county used were not all that hot. They had their problems too, like CD roms......
That and having to go to another classroom to get on a PC to do something the Mac couldn’t. Finding ways to read PC files. Everything that comes from the State is in a PC format, we had to purchase Office for Mac here just to correspond.
So it’s not like either Platform is a total solution unto itself, there is money spent and time lost in both options. Another thing, something I learnt from a teacher friend who transferred from South Dakota, teachers coming into this system are more likely to be trained in PC, making it that much easier to teach. Places like Michigan and California are losing population while Florida is gaining at an uncontrollable rate.
Something else to consider, this region use to be the senior capital of the U.S. But, in the past 10 years a change in demographics has created havoc. They’re building schools as fast as they can and still some classes are held in portables. The average age has dropped from 50 to 40 in that short time in a community of 1 million, and a region of 3 million in a state that gains 30,000 people a mouth. Cost is an ever growing factor that this retirement community was not prepared for.
But yes, Mac is a better personal computer.
