Should Our School Get Macs?

7:48 May 28th, 2009 | 0 notes

Here it is! My latest article for the school newspaper! Enjoy!

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By now you all probably know that Macs are slowly making their way into more and more of the school. There are sleek, shiny iMacs creeping into computer labs in each of the campuses. This raises the question? Should the school get more Macs?

Personally, and from a completely bias perspective, I believe we should. Macs just work better than PCs in a school environment. Lets be honest, no body likes having to wait for all of the random pop ups to finish doing their thing and wait for firefox to open before they can start doing their work on the current PCs*. From my experience using the Macs in the music center, none of this stuff happens, allowing you to get down to work right away.

Macs also have features that save time when working. On a PC, if you have multiple web pages, documents and other files open, the task bar (the blue bar down the bottom) gets cluttered very quickly. This makes it hard for you to find the window you are looking for without dragging windows all over the screen to finally uncover the right one. On the Mac, there is a simple way to see all your windows at once and quickly select the one you were after. No hassles. All the Mac users will understand what I mean when I say “It’s the button on the keyboard that makes all the windows fly around”. Get what I mean? It’s features like this that make using a Mac very quick, painless and more efficient in getting you work done.

It’s also valuable to look at the trends in what computers students are buying. Last year the highest selling laptop in the high school and university student market was the MacBook. If computers are all about making life easier and simpler, the school’s buying habits reflect the students’ decision to move to a more user-friendly and painless computer. By that I mean the students recognize Macs are easier and are buying them, therefore the school should do the same for their own peace of mind. After all, peoples’ pockets don’t lie.

The computers at school are running a version of Windows that is getting close to eight years old. That’s decades in computer years. No matter what happens, in the next few years the school will have have to upgrade the computer as the life of Windows XP comes to an end.

What do you think? Should the school continue the trend of Mac purchases? Would you like to see Windows Vista in the library computer labs instead? Would you rather we wait for the release of Windows 7 before buying new computers?

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*Note: Our school is using Novell which throws out tons of pop ups at login. Bleh!

Note: Article has been edited to maintain anonymity of my school! Yay civil liberties!

Note: Sorry for using so much italicized text.