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Education Businesses Apple

Apple Surpasses Dell in EU Education Market 88

Posted by Zonk from the europe-has-good-taste dept.
wackymacs writes "According to a report from Macworld UK, Apple has confirmed it has taken the number one spot in the Western European education market. The company's education market share in the region is now 15.2 percent, placing Dell, with 14.7 percent, to second place. Gartner analyst Isabelle Durand confirmed: 'During the fourth quarter 2005, Apple became the number one PC vendor in the Western European Education market. The company has continued to grow very strongly (+22.4 per cent) and achieved a 15.2 per cent of market share in Q4 2005.'"
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Apple Surpasses Dell in EU Education Market More

Apple Surpasses Dell in EU Education Market

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  • Either way... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by the_humeister ( 922869 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @01:45PM (#14636042)
    ...it's a win for Intel!
  • ...when Apple was the ONLY option in US education. What happened? Can it happen again if we all jump on the bandwagon?

    Sure it will, it's a closed system.

  • Smart move for Apple (Score:5, Interesting)

    by alex_guy_CA ( 748887 ) <alex AT schoenfeldt DOT com> on Friday February 03, 2006 @01:49PM (#14636063) Homepage
    If I were an OS maker thinking of the future, I would want as many school kids to work on my computers as possible. People stick with what they are used to, so if a kid works with Mac's in school, what are they going to get when they go to college, or when they buy a house. Has anyone seen any data on lifetime loyalty or stickiness for operating systems?
    • Yer damn straight! You can have my C64 when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!

    • Re:Smart move for Apple (Score:5, Informative)

      by tbone1 ( 309237 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @01:55PM (#14636110) Homepage
      Except that, at one time, Apple was THE option in US education. However, DOS/Windows became the staple of business, largely riding on the back of the "nobody ever got fired for going with IBM" mentality. People purchased a home computer based on this, and schools were convinced by the type of middle management fusspots that get on school boards that they should get kids on Windows ASAP. There were other factors involved, of course, but that was part of what led to Apple losing its dominance in education.

      Of course, whenever someone makes that "Think of the children!" argument, I tend to smack my lips and say "Mmm, delicious!"

      • Another major reason why Apple faded out of the US school system is they cut their incentives. They simply were not good enough anymore to justify the cost difference between the systems.
      • The business thing is really true, and will continue to be a large factor, but if Apple can stay ahead of the game in digital lifestyle, I think people who are used to an Apple will want one at home.

      • Except that, at one time, Apple was THE option in US education. However, DOS/Windows became the staple of business, largely riding on the back of the "nobody ever got fired for going with IBM" mentality.

        DOS had all the business programs. Apple started with stuff like VisiCalc but never got much further than that. DOS had 1-2-3, Wordstar, dBase, Paradox, Wordperfect, etc. So they became king of the business world. And people bought home computers so they could work on stuff from work, at home.

        Apple machines
        • Yes, but Apple kept their EDU dominance well past the DOS/Apple ][ days -- they had something like a 70% marketshare in the mid-90s. Their collapse in the US educational market was relatively recent (Jobs II era).

          Plus, now it sounds like the Mac holdouts in K-12 EDU land are shitting because virtually all of the software is Classic-mode "abandonware" that won't run on the Intel models.

    • Re:Smart move for Apple (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It worked on me.....

      but now I'm having the worst time trying to find any software for my TRS-80.
    • been there, tried that

      http://www.jeca.com/SMG/AFTS/afts.html [jeca.com]

      they pretty muched owned the edu market through the "apples for the students" program. even if there were some pcs in a school, they never got used since a lot of the in house "techs" were either teachers or students. the counter to this was that parents often used on pcs at work. since there wasn't an "apples for the home" program, they bought what was familiar and cheap. besides, for what most people do, the OS really doesn't matter as much anymo
    • Yeah....I think this is how Windows really took off (may be a little off, but...oh well). All the people playing games that were Windows only and since they were used to Windows, they just stuck with it since it could do the basic "needs" (word processing, email, web, etc.).

      Most of my friends who run Windows first started out with it because they wanted to play certain games that wasn't available on a Mac. Then they just stuck with that because that's what they knew and didn't want to have more than one c

  • Of course apples are the best choice for schools.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by boldtbanan ( 905468 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @01:52PM (#14636079)
    because students won't be able to play any games on them!

    (And we all know how much teachers like apples to begin with)
  • If only they can do that in the US...

  • No wonder... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03, 2006 @02:04PM (#14636161)
    Michael Dell wanted Steve Jobs to haave Apple fold their tents and give the money back to their shareholders.

    Good call......

    dumbass.
    • It is always easy to look back on something and comment on it. At the time, it was a real possibility.
    • Michael Dell wanted Steve Jobs to haave Apple fold their tents and give the money back to their shareholders. Good call......

      Actually at the time it was. Apple's current success has far more to do with iPods than their computers. Apple's future may have more to do with iPods and turning their computers into digital appliances than with computers themselves. I'm thrilled to see Apple move to Intel, but it is really mostly hype. The performance difference between x86 and PowerPC was irrlelevant to most o

  • Common misconception (Score:5, Informative)

    by this great guy ( 922511 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @02:10PM (#14636208)

    There is also this common misconception that, on the global desktop & server PC market, Apple is extremely small compared to Dell. People think that Apple sells 1% or less of the total number of PCs sold by Dell. But this is wrong, Apple has got 1/7th (14%) of Dell market share. Given this perspective, Apple suddenly appears much bigger...

    • Well, Apple's global share is around 1.9% as of 2004 [pegasus3d.com]. Dell's market share [arstechnica.com] is around 18% as of 2004. So that means, Apple has about 1/9th of Dell's market share. In terms of number of computers sold, they're still smaller than Acer. I mean, you could also rephrase your statement to say that Apple has nearly 2/3 of Acer's marketshare (or 66%). That makes Apple even larger, right?

      • Re:Common misconception (Score:2, Informative)

        by hattig ( 47930 )
        I think Apple's marketshare was around 5% the last time they said anything about it, last month. Seems the Mac Mini and iMac G5 did improve their rather piss poor marketshares since a couple of years beforehand!
        • Problem is who do you trust? Like I heard it was up to 3%-4%. 5% would be nice and realistically 10% would be something to crow about. Anything that forces MS hand to actually do something besides force useless upgrades on us all is welcome.

  • Perception (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tom ( 822 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @02:19PM (#14636278) Homepage Journal
    There is still hope that a new generation will grow up and not accept that computers crash all the time, data gets lost every now and then and for that really important word document, there can't be enough backups because you never know when the machine will just eat it.

    Also, they might have much higher expectations for a GUI and point out all the bad stuff about the windos standard we who've grown up with it don't even notice anymore.
    When my mother got her first PC, I put Linux on it. For surfing and mail it was perfect. Later on she took one of those "internet course" things. She came back with a strong dislike of "that windows thing" she had to use there. I'm certain anyone whose first exposure to computers was a Mac will have a much stronger opinion.

    • Re:Perception (Score:3, Insightful)

      by tsa ( 15680 )
      The other way around works just as well. I've tried to get many people to use Firefox, for instance, but quite a few weren't willing to accept it, because `it's crap'. Meaning it works a little bit different than IE. People are very reluctant to change, so they tend to stick with what they learned.
      • I know what you mean. I failed to introduce OpenOffice to my work team, because people were used to Word and Excel and the other crap. OO2 is clearly and very obviously superior to the old Office 2000 we have at work. No surprise, that shit is about 6 years old. But still...

        That's why Apple is doing it right moving into the market where people are first exposed to computers.
  • At the higher education school where I currently am in the UK, we have a split 50:50 Mac:Windows ratio. It's very hard to get a PC, but there are always Macs available. The general consensus around the campus is that "Macs suck" and while the Windows PCs aren't exactly amazing, the Macs are the bottom of the pile. It's not like they're using legacy OS9 Macs either; these are flat screen 17" all in one iMac G5s.

    If anything, putting their computers in an environment like a school to show young people that Mac

    • Hmm, sounds like Apple must use Lucas Electrics [netcom.com] in their UK Macs.

    • Re:Macs on Campus (Score:3, Interesting)

      by hattig ( 47930 )
      Still, Apple has come a long way since 10 years ago.

      I remember the Macs at school then. They really did suck. A lot. Looked nicer than the PCs though, but the OS and the keyboard and the mouse did suck.

      Since then, the OS has overtaken Windows substantially, Windows gets reamed by viruses and spyware too easily, and Apple's hardware still looks nicer. 'Macs suck' is just a silly teenage opinion now, rather than being based upon any real fact. Still, the UK Macs still have the @ and " swapped from the usual W
      • However people use what they're used to, they're scared to change, they're sheep. It doesn't have the comforting blue E of vulnerability, I mean, Internet on it.

        I'm sure that there are a few things you do not want to change just because some random person thinks that you should use the hottest, newest thing available? Why don't you be a real man and run OpenBSD [openbsd.org]. What, is it too hard to read clear, detailed instructions? [openbsd.org]

    • Re:Macs on Campus (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Kadin2048 ( 468275 )
      Huh, that's odd. When I was at university last, not that long ago, there was about a 60/40 Windows/Mac split, and in the public computer labs you could NEVER get a Mac. Unless you had the misfortune to be there at around 0400 on a Tuesday or something, they were always taken.

      The only problem I ever really saw with them was that they tended to have every application on them always running in the background, because Windows users never seemed to understand that Quitting an application from the menu is differe

    • Something doesn't jibe. (Score:4, Informative)

      by MisterSquid ( 231834 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @04:52PM (#14637610)

      If anything, putting their computers in an environment like a school to show young people that Macs *do indeed actually crash quite a bit, even under OS X* is a bad idea.

      I own 4 macs: a 15" Powerbook, a 12" iBook, a dual 2.5 GHz G5, and a 1 GHz G4 (MDD). These 4 machines are up and running 24/7. Two of them are servers exposed to the Internet. One of those servers also runs Final Cut Pro, email, etc.

      I can count on one hand how many times these machines have crashed since 2002 (three times). Applications do occasionally lock up but can always be force quit.

      If your macs are running OS X and the hardware is not faulty, your Macs are not going to be crashing. Since 50% Mac share at your school suggests more than a few Macs, my intuition is that you're making this up or that the users at your school don't know what a crashing Mac looks like. In other words, I think either you're lying or you have no idea what you are talking about.

      Do you have any details about these crashes?

    • Re:Macs on Campus (Score:5, Informative)

      by RedBear ( 207369 ) <redbearNO@SPAMredbearnet.com> on Saturday February 04, 2006 @06:27AM (#14640931) Homepage
      Uh-huh, yeah. I just have two things to say to that.

      1. Before Mac OS X version 10.2, I would have agreed, Macs certainly did suck. Especially Mac OS 9 and earlier. It really sucked bigtime. I hated Macs back then.

      2. If all those G5 iMacs are operating worse than the PCs on a regular basis, they need to get someone in there to maintain them who has half a clue. Those Macs should be rock solid. I speak from experience with a couple dozen different types of Macs running Mac OS X 10.2, 10.3, and 10.4. We're talking anything from G5 towers to gumdrop iMacs from 6 years ago. And proper maintenance is not rocket science either.

      You're either full of it or the techs in charge of that campus are morons. Not to mention that anyone with a little training can set up a Mac server and netboot every Mac in the building whereby it's possible to make them basically foolproof and impossible to mess up. You can make them boot from a fresh disk image every time. Great for school environments. But hey, if you hate them that much I know several million people who would be happy to take them off your hands, cheap.

      If you've got a specific piece of software that keeps crashing, here's an idea: Stop blaming it on the Mac and replace it with a different piece of software that doesn't crash. It doesn't matter how stable your OS is, if your application is crap it will still crash.
  • i have yet to see one single mac in a school or an university. in my old school there were some old hp vectras and in the vocational school there are some more or less modern hps. in the university there were mostly sun workstations.

    • Well, I live within minutes of two major universities. One has a few macs here and there and one has as many macs as PCs. The latter is a very, very big school. At my own alma mater, we probably had more Sun machines than macs, although we had a several labs of each, and at least and as many PC labs as macs. Heck, we even had a lab full of Next machines. I wonder if they are still there? It all depends upon the university.

    • At Vanderbilt, there is at least one Mac lab used for statistics and for computer music classes. The Blair School of Music faculty mostly had Macs, a dozen or so of the engineering professors had Macs as their primary machines (most of these professors wrote books on the side...I don't know if there's a connection). The physics lab exclusively used (really old) macs for some reason.

      It's the only school I know, but there were lots of macs floating around if you wanted to look for them.
    • I've been applying to uni's recently and I havent seen any macs on any of the visit days I've been on. Most places seem to have dual boot pcs (windows and linux) and i've ssen a few solaris boxes but not much else, maybe Apple are doing better outside the UK.

  • Got an iBook G4 here :) (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Per Wigren ( 5315 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @04:16PM (#14637325) Homepage
    I just started studying at N3P [n3p.se] in Stockholm/Sweden, which is a ~2 year (90 weeks) full time education in "Open Source entrepreneurship". It includes everything from project management to starting your own company to "IT" and basic system administration. Everything has a focus on Open Source, primary on the server side but also on the desktop application side. We have courses on Open Source licenses, software, philosophy etc. "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" is in the list of course material...

    Basically they thought that there are too many smart people out there with great ideas and lots of self-learnt knowledge but who are stuck in the system. "Let's make nerds into company owners."

    I really like this education. Rule #1 is "Don't follow the rules." :) A big part of the education is to think outside the box, avoid bureaucracy, turn crazy ideas into reality and revolutionize the world. :)

    Anyway, sorry for the rant. To get to the point: When we started, everyone got an iBook to use for the course. They chose to go with Mac because it has really low support costs for them ("it just works"), and it's based on UNIX so we can run and test most Open Source applications locally without hassle (through Fink or DarwinPorts). They explicitly state that we are free to format it and install Linux or BSD though, no courses rely on Mac-specific software.

    Oh, and .doc is a banned file format. :)
  • I tired of trying to get ACPI to suspend to ram on Linux; after two years of unfruitful attempts I gave in and got a powerbook; it suspends & resumes as it should and the software is not so bad :-)
    • If you're still in good terms with Linux, you might want to try Software suspend 2 [suspend2.net], which is an ACPI-independent way of hibernating to the hard drive. It's working great for me, as I can't get ACPI suspend to work either.
      • Thanks for the advice, but software suspend (Nigel Cunningham's or the stock kernel's) only does suspend-to-disk, which is way too slow for what I expect, although it does have its uses (in dual boot systems, for example). btw, it's what I used mostly on my old laptop (a dell D800), which is now more of a desktop... 8-)

        The thing that p*sses me off with ACPI (weird implementations & funky video bios) is no longer being able to just open the laptop, work a little/do something quick/whatever and close it a
        • It's usually the implementation of the ACPI DSDT (http://acpi.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] which has been written for and compiled with microsoft's non standard DSDT compiler..

          Intel's compiler complies with Intel's specs, while microsoft's compiler is tollerant of errors as is their implementation of ACPI in windows...

          Implementations of ACPI in other os's is intollerant of errors, as per Intel's original ACPI specs, and thus often fails to work with microsoft-oriented ACPI implementations.

          Also some ACPI implementations

  • More information (Score:2, Informative)

    by wackymacs ( 865437 )
    The story is missing quite a bit of substantial information, which I'll post here:

    Hewlett Packard at 14.2 percent, Acer at 9.5 percent, Fujitsu at 7.8 percent, and the remaining PC vendors taking 38.6 percent. Dell is still outcompeting Apple in the US, where Apple reportedly garners 22-23 percent of the education market share. Macworld UK reports that Apple's biggest European success is in Switzerland, where Apple holds 54.4 percent of the market-- Apple also ranks number one in France with 19.5 percent,
  • The reason this is bad news for education in Europe, particularly Switzerland and France, is that Apple is a lock in company. Buy the hardware and you are stuck. You can't move the OS to another hardware vendor, and with the MacIntels, you can't boot any other OS on the hardware. This is not something any sane person would want for public sector institutions in his country. MS is bad enough. But at least you can run the hardware of your choice and get it wherever you want.

    Its a moral issue, and its a p
    • The reason this is bad news for education in Europe, particularly Switzerland and France

      We are doing just fine here, thank you very much.

      You can play whatever you want on the iPod.

      Mac OS X is *nix. There is a good implemetation of X11 out of the box. You get Perl, Python, Apache, MySQL, etc. out of the box (no need to install Cygwin). With the native GUI applications you get, again out of the box, you can do pretty much anything you want. I can't think of a better system for Education.

      On a Mac y
      • "Why do you want to have a range of mediocre choices when you can have one good system?"

        Its what Stalin asked. One answer was given by the Gulag Archipelago. But here is another. Because freedom to choose is a value in itself. I like it for countries and governments, for religions, and for operating systems. Buy OSX and you have to run it on Apple hardware. Buy the new Intel hardware and the only thing it will run is OSX.

        People should be able to buy this if they want. But I am speaking about what is
    • I have to disagree with you, as there is no more "lock-in" with Apple than most other hardware manufacturers. Apple's operating system is fine-tuned to its hardware, true, but there is nothing preventing you from installing a Linux variant. Apple has also stated that it is also not going to prevent people from installing Windows on an intel-based Mac, only that they won't help.

      From my experience, the Apple platform is actually a lot more open than the MSWindows platform, especially in handling files. A Phot
    • "The reason this is bad news for education in Europe, particularly Switzerland and France, is that Apple is a lock in company. Buy the hardware and you are stuck. You can't move the OS to another hardware vendor, and with the MacIntels, you can't boot any other OS on the hardware. This is not something any sane person would want for public sector institutions in his country. MS is bad enough. But at least you can run the hardware of your choice and get it wherever you want." You can run Linux on your Mac h
      • You cannot run anything but OSX on a MacIntel. You cannot, I am sorry, but you just can't. Will people stop saying you can? Or show me how to boot either Windows or Linux on a MacIntel.

        Darwin is not OSX. Darwin doesn't matter, no-one runs Darwin on their Apple hardware. OSX is not open source. Will people please stop repeating this over and over again?

        Windows is not open source. The point is that Windows hardware is open. The point is that the combination of OSX and Apple hardware are linked, and
        • What kind of zealot are you ? - Everyone who runs Mc OS X runs Darwin. Darwin is the kernel, I/O layer, and BSD APIs of Mac OS X. Darwin is Open Source. If I use a closed source Window Manager and APIs to develop software on Linux, is Linux is not Open Source. If I use the close source Quartz window manager and closed source APIs in Mac OS X, does that make Darwin any less open ? - It is not Apple's fault that currently shipping Windows versions cannot boot with industry standard EFI used with Mac Inte

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