“...I don’t have the luxury of playing favorites or limiting my options by prejudiced preconceptions. I have to pick the best machine that will enable the school district to provide the most with limited funds and limited support, be reliable, last a relatively long time, be utilized to its potential, and minimize stress and anxiety of technology-novice teachers. In short, I have to consider Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)... Statistics clearly support Macintosh as having the lowest TCO....

“...The time and money spent on repairs of our Macintosh is only a fraction of what is spent on the PCs in the District... The argument that a visit to Best Buy reveals the popularity of PCs and the scarcity of Macs is a perfect example of what is called ‘increasing returns’ in economics and ‘strange attractors’ in a branch of mathematics called ‘chaos theory’....

“To become fixated on the popularity or dominance of a platform in counterproductive. The SKILLS necessary to be productive in the information society are universal regardless of platform. In fact there are more similarities to the systems than the cosmetic differences.....

“The Mac’s ease of use compared to IBM compatibles may be open to debate; the Mac’s comparative ease of networking is not. According to surveys the average time to connect a Macintosh to a network is 10 minutes; the average time to connect an IBM compatible is 45 minutes, with some installations taking more than 10 hours. In an academic environment, networking is crucial: printing, email, library catalog access, Internet access all assume a connection to the network. Preferring Macs makes networking easier.......

“As far as Macintosh only being used in Education, ask yourself if you have your prejudicial blinders on. There is no argument that for small businesses (which makes up the vast majority of industry) and home use that the PC dominates (until recently it has been less expensive than the superiorly engineered Macintosh). But when NASA proposed to standardize to Windows, they had engineers in a revolt. The engineers won and to this day you will find Macintosh on some NASA engineers’ desks. Macintosh dominates the graphic arts fields, including all those computer animated special effects out of Hollywood. Macintosh servers were for a long time only second to Sun Spark stations (Unix OS) as Web Servers.

“....In the schools we have Macintosh machines in use that are over 10 years old. PCs from ten years ago have long since been removed and are no longer supported. A 10 year old PC would be the equivalent of an 8088 or at most a 286, and unable to run any version of Windows, let alone current Web browsers or word processors.”