“One man says he’s flying from California to buy a $50 laptop, and a story about a group of Germans hopping the pond has circulated for days. In fact, response to Henrico County’s $50 Apple iBook sale has been so overwhelming that school officials are moving the Aug. 9 sale to the Richmond International Raceway, which offers more space, parking and security than an earlier-announced site. The main gate will open at 7 a.m., and the sale starts at 9 a.m.,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports. “Overnight parking and camping will be prohibited.”
“The laptops will go on sale for $50 on a first-come, first-served basis. There’s a one-per-person limit and only cash or checks will be accepted. The PowerPC 750s are white and feature a 12-inch screen, 320 megabytes of memory, Mac OS 10.2.8 and AppleWorks 6.2.9.,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Gee, if so many people want the iBooks and are willing to go to such lengths to get them, maybe the Henrico rubes should’ve kept them?
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Apple announces 30,000 iBooks deal with Florida’s Broward County Public Schools – July 27, 2005
Henrico residents object to public sale of Apple iBooks – July 26, 2005
Henrico County Public Schools to sell Apple 12-inch iBooks for $50 each on August 9th – July 25, 2005
Henrico blasted for choosing Dell laptops with Windows XP over Apple iBooks with Mac OS X Tiger – May 09, 2005
Henrico school officials on Apple to Dell switch: The logo will change, but the tool is the same – April 30, 2005
Henrico school board dumps Apple Macs, picks Dells with Windows – April 29, 2005
Henrico County Apple iBook plan in jeopardy? – April 02, 2005
Survey shows support for Henrico iBook program with ‘lukewarm support’ for Apple’s Mac OS X – March 07, 2005
Henrico poll finds students are using iBooks successfully – February 11, 2005
Henrico iBooks raise concerns among some parents – May 28, 2004
Henrico high school laptop program to continue, but will it still feature Apple Macs? – February 24, 2005
More schools experience Windows virus, worm problems while Macs just keep working – August 22, 2003
A tale of two school systems: Windows schools crippled while Mac schools unaffected – August 21, 2003
I think the only people who wanted to get rid of the iBooks were the school districts board members that probably got paid off somehow. I really doubt that the students or the teachers had anything to do with it. I’ve actually never seen anything printed about how the students and teachers view this whole thing. Did they have any say whether they should keep the iBooks or get rid of them? Probably not.
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A new AppleStore opening in Henrico? Sweet..
Man, I wish I was a mouse in the school board room. I would love to hear their reactions and what they are saying among themselves.
They’ve GOTTA be getting a clue they are being total idiots. This will just be hammered home to them over the following years as they find themselves spending more and more on IT to clean the kludge out of the Dells and have more and more downtime. They have NO IDEA how good they had it with the Apples.
this story keeps getting more and more awesome. This is great PR for Apple.
can you imagine a similar story with Dells first released 4 years ago?
2009: Henrico county plans to repeat successful resale of used laptops in 2005. Again they plan to rent Richmond International Raceway for the sales. They will be auctioning off Dell laptops.
Day after the sales: Average sales price for used Dell laptops were $20. They failed to sell over half the units. They are scheduling another sales event next week….
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The proceeds should put a minor dent in Henrico’s new support costs.
Flying in from Germany or even California to buy an “as-is” laptop is foolish. They’re not going to let everyone boot them up and take them for test drives – they’re going to be tossing them out like Mardi Gras beads…
How foolish would you feel if you flew in from Berlin and paid fifty bucks for little Skeeter’s iBook that he’s been using to prop up his skateboard ramp for the last two years.
If the Mac User Groups in the Area and resellers don’t use this as a PRIME opportunity, they are crazy
easy there…
nice fantasy existence you live in… where do I get tickets for admission?
How many students & Faculty BOUGHT their Mac Laptops? The units for sale are what was left over. I would say Henrico County SB really screwed up on this one.
Dell must have offered one sweet deal! Too bad it will take less than 40 minutes to go sour. Isn’t that the average length of time to get a virus on a WinDell. (Probably even less time than that!)
I repeat.
Typical government workers. No concern for money, because they’ve never had to live in the real world, just slurp some more out of the public trough. Jokers, every one of them. The administrator could have put them all on eBay with a hundred dollar start bid. But no, they’ll probably pay 20 or more people, DOUBLE TIME to collect the $50 from hundreds of eager buyers. Dorks, all of them ( school board).
Honestly, would anyone really care if it was a 1000 Dell’s for sale, that’s the basic equivalent of a really bad garage sale.
The original lot for the iBook program was around 24,000 units to students and teaching staff.
They are selling 1000 remaining units. So the students and teaching staff at Henrico probably still have 23,000 units around.
I wonder how much those Dells will be truly actually used, or used just to transfer the files to the iBook at home, do the homework, and transfer the result back to the Dell to show in the classroom.
Such a shame to get rid of such great macs. Oh well shows the educational system of the US promotes stupidity. The president must be so proud that he is so smart compared to the rest.
mike –
Not just that it’s new Apple store; it’s the biggest one yet!
Don’t bother visiting the Genius Bar, though. I suspect they probably had to leave it out.
Rubes? I believe this is the second time that MDN has called someone in the south a rube. Whatever.
$50 still ain’t bad–my G3 does the job still–but to fly in for a G3?
Road Warrior… yep.. this must be Bush’s fault too… just like everything else that’s wrong in the world.. past and present.
Moron.
>Such a shame to get rid of such great macs. Oh well shows the educational system of the US promotes stupidity. The president must be so proud that he is so smart compared to the rest.>
It’s the bloody unions, stupid. Give all kids a voucher, then we’ll see the education of the kids thrive and get back to where it was before the unions decimated it. Tenure my rear end.
Another waste of taxpayers money by retarded public officials.
Geez at least sell em for $149.00. If some are left after the sale, then have another sale for $99.00. After all the proceeds are headed back into the school district are they not? It’s the hottest brand in the computing world, not some piece of trash Dell.
Just to repeat:
These machines can and should run Mac OS X 10.3 Panther.
An erase-and-install would be best.
You can get cheap CDs of Panther from places like Other World Computing. (I have no affiliation with them, just trying to help.)
“The main gate will open at 7 a.m., and the sale starts at 9 a.m.” Yeah, and will finish at 9:15, if not earlier. Is there a limit-per-person? If not, expect a small number of buyers to purchase carloads of laptops in order to make a fortune on eBay.
You guys are living in a pipe dream. The ibooks are not all they are cracked up to be. There were always very long lines and a plethora of problems with the ibooks at my highschool. Yeah, I was a junior in henrico when they initiated the program. But nonetheless I am a henrico resident and I’m going to go buy one. >=D Suckas. and I wouldn’t sell it for all of King Midas’ silver.