We use a good number of macs at the school district I work at. I'll ask
around and see what I hear. I do know that it was announced at Mac world
that they were gonig away from the current processor family and going all
intel. Maybe the mac mini is the first step. Here are my thoughts on it..
1. if they go intel you pretty much have a PC clone
2. OSX.x is linux, but it could in theory run windozz
3. what is the advantage (other than haveing a PC that looks like a
tuperware sandwich box.
It has been my experiance that the cheaper macs are just that. Mac uses
less superior components on it's lower lines, I can document this with 100's
of thousands in dollars of purchases of the lower end macs over the past few
years with 10's of thousands of dollars in repair/replacement invoices. So
why do we continue to buy them? Good question. As far as repairs/failures
we have 2-3 times the cost on the mac side of the house. And this comes
from a district with approx. 8,000 computers 3-4k being mac. I hope we can
change that in the future though as they are a pain to network unless you
use the mac os for an NOS.
With that said, would I buy a mini (mac) sure, they are cute fun and a good
value in my opinion. 99.9% of users do thress things:
1.get on the internet (not platform dependent)
2. send email (see #1)
3. write documents (again see #1)
with that the mini will do fine. Plus you can use a great video/image suite
mac offers, that in my opinion is far superior to anything that windoz
offers. Sure you can buy Adobe products that are good but they don't come
with your computer and it is an extra cost.
Hope that wasn't a sipe from a fire hydrant.
Charlie
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