Brian Sweeting

In Charles Haddad’s BusinessWeek article “Apple’s School Days Are Numbered” he says Apple’s latest enemy are school superintendents and district IT managers. Unfortunately these two groups are pushing for consolidation of platforms to–you guessed it–Microsoft.

Parents don’t seem to be helping either with epithets like “Why should my child work on a Mac in class when most people use PCs at home and in the office?” In return Haddad remarks “To listen to these parents, you’d think the schools were forcing children to use a history book that says the world is flat.”

If the biggest concern for these school administrators is cost, then why replace Macs with PCs running Windows? The descision to use Windows over Linux signifies that cutting costs isn’t the number one concern.

There has never been a time of greater interoperability between Macs and PCs than now. OS X provides such flexibility that students can use the best user-interface with products like Microsoft Office as well as having access to Unix under the hood to provide students with learning on topics such as system administration and programming.