Picked up an interesting tidbit at work this week. We had an all-staff meeting and the desktop support folk who collect statistics on a number of issues revealed that consistent with their observations, more students are buying macs for their personal computer – this semester, 25% of the student body registered a mac for use on our network. That’s a huge number and contrasts sharply with the under 4% number out in the real world. It also starts to bring apple back to where they were back in the mid 90’s when they owned the education market.
What’s interesting is that in contrast to this, I saw stats on student use of campus lab machines, and the numbers indicated an overwhelming preference for use of PCs in the labs despite ready availability of Macs. I’m not sure what to make of this. Perhaps mac users come with their own machines (laptops?) and use those instead of a lab machine? Perhaps they don’t use lab machines period?
Anyway, thought folks reading here would find it interesting since most of you are mac fans.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 
Is this an indication of Mac prices coming down possibly?
A mac laptop with a core 2 duo would be pretty sweet.
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Maybe the people who don’t use computers enough to own one don’t know better and thus use the PCs 😉 Just like how everyone used to think you needed AOL to get on the internets…
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The mac pricing thing is a longstanding closely held myth – over the years at times macs have been more expensive than PCs (sometimes a *lot* more expensive), but for more than 5 years they have had rough price parity with something you would buy from HP or Dell, and their laptops have been excellent bargains relative to what you get for quite a while now, so I don’t think price is the driving factor, though it’s possible it is since most folks still think macs = expensive.
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The thing is, most all students come to school with computers now, so that theory is out too.
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