On-campus Mac users quadruple


I never thought I'd switch to a Mac. After all, I have used PCs since I was 5 years old. I carried around my old Dell Inspiron 8000, a bulky nine-pound beast of a laptop, throughout high school, and it never suffered from any hardware problems over its five-year lifespan.

    The trouble was Windows — the operating system from hell.

By Doug Eshleman
Princetonian Staffer

 So I decided to take the plunge and get a Mac. I wasn't alone; in fact, 40 percent of Princeton students and faculty use Macs as their personal computers.

    In the 2003-04 school year, when the iPod was just becoming popular, a mere 10 percent of Princeton students had Mac computers connected to the network, OIT director Steven Sather said.

    Sixteen percent of students chose Macs when the Class of 2008 arrived on campus the subsequent fall. The figure reached 23 percent the following year and then jumped to 31 percent of all personal computers on the network in fall 2006.

    This year, the University's Student Computer Initiative has sold more Macs than PCs. Students were offered a selection of Dell, IBM and Apple computers, and 60 percent chose Macs, up from 45 percent last year.

    These figures are even more surprising when compared to Apple's relatively small market share of computers sold in the United States — 5.9 percent — as reported by MacWorld in August.

    After four years of skyrocketing Mac ownership, however, the advent of Windows Vista sparked speculation that Microsoft could reclaim its former dominance on campus.

    But the operating system's debut was not all that PC users had hoped for. Vista requires a much more powerful computer to run properly, and unfortunately, some of the Dells found in computer clusters and science labs don't measure up.

    "Some of the machines are three years old and are not beefy enough to run Vista optimally," said Leila Shahbender, manager of customer support at OIT.

    Vista's sleek new interface — touted as sexy by Microsoft advocates — is almost useless and is so taxing that the system should be sold with additional memory. I mean, why hassle your customers?

Read the rest of the story here:
The Daily Princetonian - On-campus Mac users quadruple

Posted: Thu - November 1, 2007 at 07:26 PM          

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