sorry i have been out on the water chasing whales for a couple of
weeks and am behind in the rev list.
Peter,
I beg to differ on this point. Almost all my clients are poor
educational and charitable orgs. the big thing here (which others
have mentioned) is total cost of use of the equipment, not just the
hardware price. PCs only do well with small orgs when there is
someone (usually a volunteer) that is very handy with computers and
willing to come in and keep things going. i have had many orgs take
donation pcs or buy cheap pcs with costs in mind only to end up
spending horrendous amounts of time (and in some cases money) keeping
things running. Macs have traditionally had very low total cost of
ownership costs in many ROI studies and this has also been proven out
many times in my personal experience in this sector. If an org does
not have someone that can manage a pc well then it can be trouble.
linux is totally over the heads of all the small non profits i work
with. IT support is totally non existent with most small non profits.
even if they have a good staff member or volunteer to keep things
running this is dangerous since if they leave the org is screwed (i
know i have lived through this a few times).
In education the gifts of apple equipment did get some loyalty, but
the big reason that macs still have a large share of that market is
that they are easy to keep going and the hardware tends to live on
and on and on (sometimes you just want to go out and shoot an old
machine since its so old, but still chuggin along and no one wants to
loose a machine thats working!). they can also be managed by a
teacher with just a little bit of computer savvy and willingness to
just play with things. the first thing in school budgets to go are
education IT support (administration keeps getting it) and computer
lab instructors/managers. the support goes but the hardware is still
there...
I had these points drive home really hard when i went back to my old
high school to teach for a year. i had a mac lab that was a mish mash
of like 7 or 8 models ranging in age from new to 7 or 8 years old. i
had about 30 some odd desk tops and another 25 laptops. down the hall
we new pc lab with 25 dells all identical and a full time tech (he
didnt teach, just kept things running and installed stuff) who was ms
certified up the wazoo. i was not certified in any way
(certifications, certifications, we dont need no stinking
certifications!) and was teaching full time. i usually had a machine
or two down and usually they were just waiting for a hardware order
to come in or just the spare hour to fix things. the pc lab usually
had 4-5 machines down at any time. i would see the tech in there
earnestly trying to fix them for hours. The pc lab was paid for by a
grant from the business classes (they thought it was wrong to learn
computing on a mac) and halfway through the first quarter i had most
of the business instructors begging for some spare time in the mac
lab to do their classes.
the last funny thing lately has been about 5 small business owners i
know in the last 6 months have called up and asked what macs they
should buy for their business. they were all hard core pc users and
were all pretty savvy computer users and the last people in the world
i would have ever thought would switch sides (each of them were some
of my worst rassers of me using macs mostly). They all said pretty
much exactly the same thing that they just had the last straw drawn
and realized how much time they were wasting keeping the computers
running instead of using the computer to do their work and get income.
personally i have had to work both sides of the fence (mac, pc and
others) over the last 20 years and i keep realizing the same thing
that the extra investment up front really pays off on the long run
and i think this proves true to a lot of folks out there...
cheers
Jeffrey Reynolds
On Jul 15, 2007, at 6:40 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
But for poor educational or charitable sector organizations to buy
Minis just
seems to me a totally disordered sense of priorities. Still more
if a prime
purpose is to run Rev, which is (one of its pleasures) so remarkably
forgiving of low end hardware. I have had absolutely no, zero,
complaints
about responsiveness on our 500Mhz machine running the Rev app.
Its instant.
If we were teaching programming on it, using Rev, I think it would be
perfectly fine and at least as responsive as a Mini. The graphics
are of the
same generation anyway.
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