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| Wednesday, June 29, 2005 |
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Intel transition could be hard on the short term education market
3:34am, Jun 28 - By Dennis Sellers
Apple’s transition to Intel chips could hurt Apple sales in the education sector, at least over the short haul. However, in the long run, it could be beneficial IF the move means less expensive, more energy-friendly Macs.
There’s no more budget conscious arena in which Apple has strong sales than the education sector. Money is tight and, in most school systems, stretched to the limit these days. Those in the education field want to make sure they get the most bang for their buck. School personnel will probably hold onto the computer systems they now have as they await to see how the Apple-Intel move shakes out.
School personnel, like many corporations, are careful and slow about adopting new technology. They tend not to be early adopters because of, again, the money situation and the fact that they want to see how the new tech shakes out. Those in charge of school purchases will most likely wait to buy “Mactel” systems until they see how reliable and easy-to-use the systems are. They’ll also be looking to get a handle on which educational software programs will run on the revamped Mac line.
Then there’s the fact that the Classic environment will be apparently be extinct when the Mactel systems arrive. I see no evidence that the Intel-based Macs will run Classic, the “environment” that lets software that wasn’t ported to Mac OS X run under the operating system. I haven’t used the Classic environment in years and won’t miss it a bit. However, I’d be willing to bet that schools, at least K-12 systems, use Classic more than any other market to run older software. This is another reason schools may be slow to buy Macs during the transition phase from PowerPC chips to Intel processors.
Though Mactel systems will have a sort-of emulation environment called Rosetta, which runs existing PowerPC applications on the Intel platform during the transitional period, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been adamant that Rosetta is “nothing” like the Classic environment in terms of performance and usability. And documentation for Apple’s Rosetta technology says the transcoding software won’t support programs written for Mac OS 8 or Mac OS 9.
On the plus side, Mactel systems could offer schools even more economically priced Macs (though the eMacs and the Mac minis are great buys for educational institutions) and laptops with longer battery life. Plus, the fact that Intel-based Macs will apparently be able to boot into Windows as well as Mac OS X may help sales skyrocket among educational buyers who have fallen into the “we must buy Windows systems because Microsoft rules the world” hype.
But for the short term, selling Macs to school systems may be a challenge. |
| posted by Perimbean @ 1:30 AM |
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