On 4/29/02 8:21 PM, "Josh Hillmann" <josh_hillmann_at_mac.com> wrote:
>
> What is an "eMac"?
http://www.apple.mac.com/education/emate
Today Apple announced the availability of its new product, the eMac. This
computer is made specifically for the education market. In fact, you must be
purchasing on behalf of a school to even get one. Get a good look at it,
because it won't be around long. Remember the Cube? Here is its successor.
This is a nifty looking thing, but it's way, way too expensive for schools.
School districts are buying Dells and Gateways by the truckload because they
can get a tower, monitor, keyboard and mouse for $600. If you had to buy
three dozen computers for your school, would you rather pay $600 for one or
twice that much? The people who make these purchases are not concerned with
how fantastic the platform is, they're only concerned with what the cost
will be. Schools are not exactly rolling in dough. How do I know? I'm the
guy who makes all the tech purchases for the private school I work for. You
know what Apple's education discount is for most machines? $100. Wow, that
will just about cover the shipping. Glad you could spare it, Apple.
We all know Apple has a killer platform, great software and great hardware.
I'm lucky enough to work for a Mac-friendly school, and in fact, I ordered 7
new iMacs that arrived last week. We got the $799 indigos for one reason:
cost. Apple is very rapidly losing the education market, and if they want to
regain that foothold, they need to wake the hell up and lower the cost on
their damn machines. It drives me nuts. I recently saw two elementary
schools (with about 600 kids each) replace all their aging Macs with Dells.
Every single one.
How many elementary or high schools need G4's in the classroom? None. In
fact, we have three servers here (file server, a Retrospect backup server
and a Filemaker server), and only the fileserver is a G4. The other two are
biege G3's that do their job splendidly. Hell, the G3 all-in-one's they gave
us years ago are still great machines. Do we need flat panels? No. It would
be nice, but it's not the least bit necessary. How many machines here at
work run OS X? One: mine. You think we're gonna retrain 150 people on OS X?
Half of them can't even find the damn "on" button, let alone learn Apple's
new Finder etc.
Oh, Apple. I love you and despise you at the same time. I'll never stray
from your products personally, but your pricing and marketing (don't even
get me started on dumb commercials that say NOTHING about the product--the
iMac ad is horrible, I don't care what you say--or the countless OS X ads
we've seen (read:zero. It's been more than a year. What are we waiting
for?), or the iPod ad that I saw ONCE on tv) decisions baffle me.
I don't care how nice looking, compact, capable, speedy or
teacher/student-friendly the eMac is. For $1200, only the wealthiest school
districts will buy them. And their ain't many of those. So say "Hello" to
eMac: the new Cube. It'll be a neat collectable, though. I'll pick one up
on Ebay in a couple years.
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