Mac use explodes at University of Virginia; 37.5% of first-year students are Mac users

macdailynews ^

[Gomez]

The University of Virgina collects and compiles information about students' computer use. The information has been collected over the past decade by student employees of ITC, known as Student Consultants (SCs) and formerly, Computing Advisors (CAs), a group of first-year students hired to advise and assist their peers with computing. The data is based on SC and CA surveys of first-year residence halls each fall.

[Swordmaker]

What I also know is that for some reason those Macs are hauled back into the stores constantly — any time I am in a mall that houses a Mac store, there they are, kids marching through the mall(s), lugging their Mac computers.

A lot of what you are seeing is simply that Apple offers every-hour free training classes on various Mac topics and software and people bring their laptops and even their iMacs in to participate in those classes. There are also paid ($100 for a year) one hour one-on-one weekly training sessions that require you to bring your computer.

Finally, as to reliability. You could not be more wrong. Apple Macs have consistently been rated either #1 or (infrequently) #2 in reliability among computer makers.

As to customer satisfaction, Apple's beat all comers:

Source: Changewave

Consumers' Reports also lists the Apple computers at the top of their listings... and give them very high marks in reliability and in tech support success both this year and last.

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Apple wins big in Consumer Reports survey
Company scores high in help desk support
By Brad Reed, Network World, 05/05/2008

In what is sure to become more fodder for Mac vs. PC ads, Consumer Reports' latest tech-support survey shows that Apple has the best help-desk support for both laptop and desktop systems.

According to the survey, which polled Consumer Reports' subscribers for their experiences with 10,000 desktop and laptop computers, Apple's help desk staff far and away had the highest success rate among computer manufacturers. Apple's tech support team helped their customers solve problems with their computers more than 80% of the time. Industry-wide, help-desk teams from all companies solved their customers' problems around 60% of the time.

Consumer Reports also singled out Lenovo for its "outstanding" tech support for laptops, and Dell for providing "above average" support for both laptops and desktops. HP and Compaq on the other hand, offered "inferior support" for their computers, according to the survey.

Additionally, the survey ranked the best places and methods for consumers to get help for their computers. In-store walk-in tech support for Macs provided for free in Apple stores offered the most effective troubleshooting, the survey found, with user problems getting solved 90% of the time. Another good option is the in-home service offered by companies such as Dell and HP, as 75% of users who called for in-home service reported that they experienced no problems during the process, the report said.

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Consumer Reports Takes a Shine to Apple
By STEPHEN WILLIAMS

Hitting for the cycle is a rare event in baseball, and rare as well in the pages of Consumer Reports.

So when you go three for three—as Apple has in the recent laptop computer-ratings issue—and score highly in other categories, it’s worth at least a nod.

Whether you purchase religiously at retail based on the opinions of CR tests or pooh-pooh their findings altogether—I fall into some middle ground there when it comes to electronics—an educated consumer might do well to examine the charts in the current June issue, just released.

In laptops, Apple MacBooks rated first in the 13-inch category, the 14-to 16-inch size, and the 17-inch list; Dell, Toshiba and Hewlett-Packard were also-rans. The 15-inch MacBook Pro was rated overall with a score of 75 out of 100, ahead of a 64-rated Toshiba Satellite (the Pro costs $2,000, the Toshiba $700).

Among desktops, the Mac mini finished second to an H-P Pavillion Slimline, and the iMac placed second behind a Dell XPS One.

CR surveyed its readers about computer tech support. Apple trounced the field in both desktop and laptop categories.

For shoppers on the cusp of a purchase decision, I’d suggest holding off another month or so. There’s a buzz about, detailed at Apple Insider, that price cuts may be imminent for some of their desktop (as in iMac) and portable (low-end MacBook) models.

Also, it’s a good bet that Apple will again offer a back-to-school promotion for students this summer; last year, the company gave away iPod touch models with most computer purchases. That promotion usually starts in June and runs until September.

[John Valentine]

Kids and grandparents, actually - or anyone willing to trade scalability, flexibility and cost for simple computing

Or how about an engineer willing - anxious even - to trade endless frustration, breakdowns, slowdowns, maddening interface inconsistencies, and mile-deep trash heaps of menu heirarchies for simple, reliable, controllable, and - yes, FLEXIBLE computing?

Your world view is seriously skewed.

[Bubba]

Mac... simply the difference in a machine and a toy.

[ReignOfError]

I know every brand has its issues, but when I go to other stores that carry PCs, I don’t see so many people hauling them in while I’m there.

That's now I know used cars are much more reliable than new cars. Every time I go to a new car dealer -- any make -- there are always a bunch of folks bringing them back to be serviced. You never see that at used car dealers.

[AppyPappy]

The reason they buy a Mac: It can boot Windows

[aMorePerfectUnion]

“And, candidly, their commericials bother me.

That’s a good sign. The last thing a marketer wants is a
yawn. And when you are not the market leader, you should
attack.

[Mr. Blonde]

That is what makes Microsoft’s new campaign so interesting. They are attacking Apple.

[ReignOfError]

What makes the Microsoft campaign interesting to me is that it omits any mention of any Microsoft product. It’s all about “the PC” which Microsoft doesn’t make or sell; nary a whisper about Windows.

[antiRepublicrat]

Back in the day we did make computer systems that didn't crash, but they were embedded systems programmed by a couple of people, relatively simple and well tested. Almost deterministic systems.

You can still get that with Minix. The strict microkernel architecture does cause a performance hit, but it's supposed to be almost uncrashable.

Macs are overpriced and a closed architecture.

Overpriced is a value judgment based on your needs and desires vs. what Apple offers at what price. Many others determine that Macs are a better value than PCs. Their entry price point is higher than PCs, but then Mercedes' entry price point is higher than Kia's.

[antiRepublicrat]

The “everything is a file” mindset is horrible; your monitor is not a file, nor is your hard-disk.

"Everything is a file" is great because it makes it easy for us programmers to do anything. Need to write to a device? Just write to its file. Apple just did well in hiding that strange concept from users.

[TXnMA]

"Why should you need to buy an “upgrade” just to do normal work?"

Name anything for Windows (including Windows, itself) that ever worked so perfectly that it could not benefit from improvement (or "upgrade" or a "new version")....

BTW, what are those things called, "Service Packs"?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

How's it feel -- living in a glass house..?

[TXnMA]

"...a single mouse button is sooo limiting..."

Mouse? What's that? I have a drawer full of those rat-like thingys that came with various Macs, and frankly, they have never been used -- not once.

With the great "Multi-Touch" keypad on my Macbook Pro, I never use a mouse -- including for creating extremely complex technical graphics -- including CAD designs and multi-layered historic maps.

Of course, you obviously never looked at a Mac honestly enough to discover that functions like "right-clicking" are trivial (as in simple "preference" settings) to set up on a Mac...

[OneWingedShark]

>>The “everything is a file” mindset is horrible; your monitor is not a file, nor is your hard-disk.
>
>”Everything is a file” is great because it makes it easy for us programmers to do anything. Need to write to a device? Just write to its file. Apple just did well in hiding that strange concept from users.

That’s like saying Assembler is great because it allows you to do ANYTHING the computer CAN do... it is true; however, it does not disallow things that should NOT be done, nor does it generally help the programmer. A good example of things that CAN be done that shouldn’t be done can be found in C/C++ and is one ‘feature’ of being able to use an assignment inside the condition-test of a control structure like IF.

A better design, IMO, would be to use the OOP paradigm of thought where “things are objects” (single-ancestor object) & then have a base-class wherein the object ‘knows’ how to write itself to a stream and another method for receiving an object from a stream and use those. A slight abstraction of the general concept, but somewhat better. Personally though, I would tend towards a model wherein a device is represented/interfaced by an object with, as an example, a ‘geneology’ of something like TObject -> TSystemObject -> TDevice -> TOutputDevice -> TMonitor [-> TSpecificMonitor]. {IE something similar design-concept wise to Borland’s old TVision API or their [newer] VCL.}

What I’m getting at is that just because you CAN do something with one mode-of-thought does not mean that mode of thought is well-suited to the problem at hand. Take, for instance, the problem of the relationship between the hands of an analog-clock (suppose you wanted to find how-often and when/where they were pointing in the same direction). Intuitively you immediately see that 24 is the correct number and that 12:00 and 6:00 am&pm are ‘zeroes’ [solutions] in your problem. Expressing this in the x/y Cartesian Plane is doable, but it results in unnecessary effort; a more elegant solution would be to use polar-coordinates, it is a different mode-of-thought but perfectly suited for thinking about this problem.

[cartervt2k]

Maybe Windows is losing steam - PC’s are not. You have a multitude of options for what you want to run on a PC. Hell, they can even run MacOS (Hackintosh), if you want. Try that on a Mac. Uh, Carter? Macs run Windows (3.1 through Vista and 7), all versions of Linux, they ARE certified UNIX, Mac OS X.0 through X.5.6 (and OS X.6 Snow Leopard), MS DOS, and a host of other OSes. Many PC magazine pundits have reported that Windows runs faster on a Mac than on equivalent speed PCs.

I used to use a Mac in my school lab - I'm aware they can run Windows. Since much of the software we were required to use didn't run on MacOS, it was necessary. However, those were PowerPC Macs, and the emulator it used to run windows was nothing short of terrible. I would expect it to be better now that they're running Intel architecture.

Mac's definitely have their place. Sure, they're safer and more reliable - that's what happens when you have the same manufacturer selling an operating system and hardware, but at what point does it become cost-prohibitive? I guess that depends on the person.

I've never had a problem with PC's - largely because I know what I'm doing (and what not to do). There are a lot of people who don't know what they're doing and start breaking things, get frustrated and buy Mac's - I get it. To me, I'd rather have the same hardware (without the proprietary piece that allows MacOS to run) at a cheaper price and rather run an OS that gives me more control over my computer, even if that opens the door for potential exploits that a savvy user knows how to avoid.

[cartervt2k]

Kids and grandparents, actually - or anyone willing to trade scalability, flexibility and cost for simple computing

Or how about an engineer willing - anxious even - to trade endless frustration, breakdowns, slowdowns, maddening interface inconsistencies, and mile-deep trash heaps of menu heirarchies for simple, reliable, controllable, and - yes, FLEXIBLE computing?

Your world view is seriously skewed.

I do a lot of advanced computing, and I've never had a problem with any version of Windows. I've seen some Windwos machines with slowness problems, etc., but usually the result of users who unwittingly install crapware and don't know how to do routine computer housekeeping.

[antiRepublicrat]

I like it because of how easy it makes scripting. You can do almost anything by piping and redirecting with one command.

Luckily, Apple abstracts from that to the object-oriented Objective C for higher level developers.

[Mr. Blonde]

Aren’t most comparable computers from other manufacturers of pretty equal price to the equivalent Mac? Most price comparisons I have seen put the Mac at a little higher, but then Macs have certain qualities that don’t easily fit onto a comparison sheet.

[OneWingedShark]

>I like it because of how easy it makes scripting.

Does it? I mean I can think of one case where such FAILS miserably: what if the output of a program changes? What happens to your script?

>You can do almost anything by piping and redirecting with one command.

You can do almost anything by programming up a Turing machine... though the definition of said machine may b more complex and cumbersome than the problem you are solving.

>Luckily, Apple abstracts from that to the object-oriented Objective C for higher level developers.

Abstraction is a good thing, agreed; however basic design-flaws cannot be [easily] cured via abstraction.

The argument can be made that text is the optimal method for storing data as it is what we tend to think in; why then do we have binary data-files? Think about a save-game file for chess you could do a test file like the following:
Knight, Black, 6, 3
King, White, 7, 3
Bishop, White, 8, 3
...
Or you could store it in a binary file with a record like this:
Record
Piece : Chesspiece;
IsWhite : Boolean;
Location : record x,y : Byte end;
end;

Which are you more likely to use? Why?

[cartervt2k]

I can’t speak to the motivations of virus programmers - I suspect they vary, but it probably has something to do with gaining notoriety. What I do know is the success rate relates directly to the prevalence of the target and of the level of difficulty in creating an attack. Likewise the more ubiquitous a technology, the greater the odds of users discovering exploits. A particular brand/model cell phone may not be as common as a Mac, but maybe it’s very easy to hack? The sheer number of PC users alone dwarfs that of Mac users, and it’s not as if Apple’s market share is that of the power user/hacker anyway.

If the Apple/MacOS is as impregnable as you might think, you wouldn’t be able to download a hacked PC-ready version right now, and you wouldn’t be able to hack your iPhone to work with GSM providers other than AT&T.

There’s no question Mac’s closed architecture does lend itself a greater level of protection than open environments like the PC world. Since I know what I’m doing and know how to avoid most threats, I’d rather branch out, have a computer with a greater software compatibility list and more change in my pocket.

[tubebender]

My daughter works at HSU and she says the book store only carries Macs in stock and they sell a lot for a small school of 8,500 students...