Macs on college campuses

paul

20 minutes ago I was inthe lounge of my dorm, and there was 3 mac laptops in there 2 powerBooks (one of them mine) and 1 iBook....



ive found that in BC macs really arnt that uncommon at all...



is this an indication that macs are becoming more prevalant in the higher education field or is it just BC?

applenut

macs are pretty prevalent in many higher ed institutions... I think its just overlooked. Not all of em of course but there are definitely some very mac friendly campuses.



Stanford is amazing with how many macs they have... they reccomend a mac over a pc... the libraries are packed with them.... employees use them... registration is done on iMacs.... they are all over... it's pretty cool.



I went down to the U of MD last weekend and their bookstore had a very nice iMac display right at the front of the computer section.

tigerwoods99

I registered for classe s G3, and the lab we were in was all beige G3s. However, probably a majority of students use PCs. I was on one of the girl's floors picking up a friend to go eat, and I noticed a bunch of Macs through the open doors. There were a couple flat panel iMacs I noticed and in the girl's room was an old skool iMac. The architecture students all use Powerbook G4s I believe, which makes me wanna switch majors just so I'm required to have one. I was also very pleased to see that a good number of people in my programming class did not use Windows. Some Linux & Mac nuts in there which is cool.Oh, and I had to note today a girl in English was saying that she just got a Mac and had never used one prior to college.

dogcow

Paul, sadly there used to be MANY more macs here at BC. About 5 years ago all the administrative offices were forced into leaving their macs (quadras at the time, and before that mac classics) and getting IBMs. Most of the staff resisted the change and complained. The whole project was meant to cut back on spending, but they ended up spending about 3 times as much as they should have on IT. The network still doesn't work right (when it did when it was mostly macs) and many employes still beg to get their macs back. The whole "switch" was a major pain and a huge headache for everyone.

Also, at the time educational offices were given the option to keep their macs or "switch". Most all of those offices decided to keep their macs and were upgraded to B&W G3s.



As It stands now there are about 16 B&W G3s in the library, about 30 or so eMacs in main computer "laB" area, there are other labs around campus including one full of Superdrvie/Cinema display G4s which for some reason is very hard to get access too. Administrative offices are all IBM desktops running on B&W G3s as servers (odd, ha?). Educational offices can use what they want and most of them do use macs.



Just an interesting note, much of the statistical information and headings that are displayed on the "jumbotron" during hockey and basketball games is controlled with hypercard. There are two Quardas set up running custom hypercard stacks that hold stats and output text onto the board. Long live hypercard!

thuh freak

at my school the mac population varies depending at which college ur in. in comp and info science, its mostly solaris boxen. in lib arts its mostly macs. in most others its windows. i think the servers are pretty much all unix (solaris). the liberry has a bunch of everything, mostly windows tho.



in the dorm section tho, since all majors are mixed together up in here, it can vary wildly. last year, i was the only mac on the floor. this year there are three or four others.



i think i'm still the only soft-engineering major with a mac tho (gotta love being a trailblaizer).



[edit] also, i noticed that many teachers (outside of comp&info sci) who do comp presentations use powerbooks. they got old ones tho, and some complain about speed and shit leaving a bad impression on the young and impressionable students. [/edit]



[ 10-07-2002: Message edited by: thuh Freak ]</p>

stunned

In my school, I am probably the only one with a mac. kinda makes me special.

alcimedes

i used to be the only student in the entire business school with a Mac.



buch of stuffy dorks.

smithjoel

University labs are about 50/50 Mac/Windows. However OS X isn't fully supported yet, so all of the Mac labs run OS 9 with Netware.



College of Enginering labs dosn't have any Macs. Windows mostly, with Solaris and SGI too. ComSci is 50/50 Window/Linux, not Macs there either.

chych

At my school (Carnegie Mellon) there are tons of macs around, I think we have two 80 flat panel iMac clusters (something like that), and various other mac clusters around (b&w g3 cluster downstairs in my dorm). Lots of PCs too, and a bunch of solaris machines. They moved us to OS X/Win XP on everything, OS 9 isn't really used anymore, heck a lot of the macs don't even have classic installed.

matsu

Macs are in sharp decline in education, at least in Southern Ontario. My university is looking more and more like a Dell office, and just about every school board I've seen has been replacing macs with PC's. Except for the rare case where they have a digital/cyber-arts program, then they have macs, but in only that lab and for that purpose only. The rest of the school gets PC's. Contrast that 20 years ago when even the secretaries had macs on their desks.



Digital rights and licensing might turn things around for the mac. If M$ licensing gets any weirder, we might see more macs again, but as it stands now, it doesn't look pretty.



[ 10-07-2002: Message edited by: Matsu ]</p>

smithjoel

[quote]Originally posted by Matsu:

<strong>Digital rights and licensing might turn things around for the mac. If M$ licensing gets any weirder, we might see more macs again, but as it stands now, it doesn't look pretty.</strong><hr></blockquote>



See that's were MS is strong in Education(at least at colleges). They get them to agree to campus licencing. "Yes Microsoft, $200,000 sounds ok for upgrades this year. What we can't use Word Perfect Office... no problem the budget is gone anyway."

shawnpatrickjoyce

Macs at King's College are relegated only to graphic design labs in the mass communications department. I'm typin' on an utterly useless dell optiplex with the ugliest LCD...

paul

I think the coolest thing about it is when people just kinda show up on your rendezvous list....



maybe thats just because the only people who have been showing up have been girls! (all of them also happen to be good looking... coincidence? i think not )

alcimedes

you know, that's interesting. in all my life, the women who've used macs have all been pretty, most well above average. strange.....

sledgehammer

My sister's a freshman at BC, she's got a new iMac combodrive. I am at a much smaller school, for a while I though I was the only mac user, but I began discovering more mac users when I started taking my PB and Airport to the coffee shop. This year, both my roomates and my RA all have macs. There are several other students as well. The camus is officially all Dell, but the newspaper uses to PM G4s and there are a few others here and there around campus. Like the lonely strawberry iMac among a sea of black dell boxes in one of the comuter labs.

mcq

Here at UF there's very few macs, I believe there's maybe 30% macs at the computer labs around campus, not sure since I've never been to any of them. I know the CS labs are about half Win 2000, half Linux/Unix boxes. Occasionally I'll pass by someone on campus using an iBook, but it's definitely rare. I guess it depends on the university you're at, and what dept you're in.

paul

SledgeHammer, check your private messages <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" />

serrano

Here at UCSB there are a ton of macs, and I mean a ton. I used to work for housing, part of my job was to do 'room service' to all student rooms in my dorm. ie. empty trash and vacum. Anyways it was about 20% mac last year, and this year it was almost 1/2!!! All the new mac's were ibooks just like mine... The mac's are evenly spread across both sexes this year, unlike last. iBooks are mostly guy's, Ti's are mostly girls. go figure. i guess nothings good enough for daddy's little girl. this tends to be a rich school.

serrano

[quote]Originally posted by serrano:

<strong>Here at UCSB there are a ton of macs, and I mean a ton. I used to work for housing, part of my job was to do 'room service' to all student rooms in my dorm. ie. empty trash and vacum. Anyways it was about 20% mac last year, and this year it was almost 1/2!!! All the new mac's were ibooks just like mine... The mac's are evenly spread across both sexes this year, unlike last. iBooks are mostly guy's, Ti's are mostly girls. go figure. i guess nothings good enough for daddy's little girl. this tends to be a rich school.</strong><hr></blockquote>



This was just my dorm, 200 rooms, 400 students.

tigerwoods99

So wait, if someone on the school network or in my dorm is using 10.2 they will automatically show up on my buddy list for Rendezvous? Hmm...I just checked and it doesn't seem to be any different....come on people update your freakin OS!! I know for a fact there are some girls using the new iMacs.

paul

i think they have to have first 3 of the 4 numbers in your IP... im not exactly sure how it works, but i can only see this one girl if I am in my room, but when i go to the lounge i can see this other girl and not the one i can see in my room and when i am in econ i can see some professor.... its weird



yeah 3 of 4 i just checked with the girl...