“Pound for pound, Apple Macintosh systems are still pricier than many PCs. The recently introduced Mac Mini, which lists for $499 to $699, is only a good deal if you already own a monitor. The DVD-burning eMac is a surprise bargain at just less than $999 [Combo drive eMac starts at $799]. For iBooks, the performance sweet spot is about $1,300 [iBooks start at $999]; for iMacs, it’s more, about $1,500 [iMacs start at $999],” The New York Times’ Wilson Rothman writes in an article republished today by The Globe and Mail.
“That does not mean that a Macintosh is not a sound investment. In fact, being a student or a teacher has its privileges in the Mac world. The Apple Store for Education sells products up to $300 less than their Apple Store prices. Since Apple controls how much its authorized resellers charge, those discounts are precious indeed,” Rothman writes.
“To qualify, you identify your school (kindergarten through high school or college) from a menu, and agree that you will buy only a total of three computers and one monitor in an academic year. Once you’re in, there’s a bonus: If you buy an iBook, PowerBook, iMac or Power Mac and a 4-gigabyte iPod Mini, you get a $179 mail-in rebate. In other words, the iPod Mini is essentially free. (The offer expires Sept. 24.),” Rothman writes.
“When it comes to buying software, going Mac could save you money. Microsoft Office for Mac generally sells for more than $250, and we found the student-teacher version on-line for $125 at Shopping.com. But if all you really need is Microsoft Word, you can get Apple’s iWork ’05 Academic for $50. Its Pages word processor is completely Word compatible. As long as you save your papers in the right format, your teachers won’t know the difference,” Rothman writes.
Full article here.
Educational customers who buy a Mac through September 24th will get a free iPod mini and a chance to save up to $479 when combined with their student discount.
Buy a Mac. Get a free iPod mini. And save up to $479 with your everyday student discount. It’s simple. Visit your campus computer store, the Apple Store online or an Apple Store near you. Choose an iBook, PowerBook, iMac or Power Mac, then select your favorite 4GB iPod mini. Or you can apply your $179 savings toward the purchase of a higher priced iPod. But act now. This offer is good only through September 24, 2005.
More info here.
Are you a Windows-only student or teacher? Apple has posted Quicktime movies that show Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger’s features:
• Automator
• Dashboard
• Exposé
• Fast User Switching
• iChat AV 3
• .Mac Sync
• Mail 2
• Parental Controls
• QuickTime 7 with H.264
• Safari RSS
• Spotlight
• VoiceOver
Apple’s web site for Education: http://www.apple.com/education/
Advertisement:
Microsoft Office for Mac Student and Teacher Edition – just $99.95, with mail in rebate, through September 16, 2005.
Or use whatever word processor you want and save it in the universal PDF format. I would prefer that anyway, who is to say the teacher won’t accidentally wipe out some content on your paper while reading it?
I heard that MacDan!! You go to the back of the class young man. Shame on you for thinking such a thing 🙁
Great idea MacDan, except most schools can’t run the text against plagerism checkers with PDFs.
Then just use whatever word processor you want and save it as a universal RTF (rich text format) file.
The Mac is still more for the money no matter how you look at it. The stability of the system software, securtiy and lack of viruses alone is worth it.
Actually, if you don’t want to do anything fancy TextEdit will save in Word format too. For a lot of people they are just looking to use the computer as a typewriter and TextEdit does fine at this. It is what my Mom uses all the time. The last thing she needs are confusing choices and the simplicity of TextEdit fits the bill really well for her.
I’m surprised to see a New York Times article give such practical advise as ditch the expense of M$ Word and use Apple Pages.
I wish more developers would make their apps interoperable with generic Apple OS apps like TextEdit rather than their dependance on M$ Word. For example OD4Contact will only do mail merge with M$ Word, bad choice.
TextEdit rocks! Hey, while we are talking about free Apple software that doesn’t get the respect it deserves – Image Capture is sweet, too. I am a graphic designer/photographer and it is just fine for 90% of my scanning tasks and imports from my camera and run scripts on the files, awesome. and simple. Now, if it supported controlling my particular camera from the Mac I could dump the absolutely horrendous Nikon Capture software (yuck).
Still, a pretty backhanded compliment. — “Yeah, Apples are overpriced, but if you get a sweet educational discount then they are worth consideration.” Gee, thanks.
The Globe and Mail is a Canadian paper — perhaps the prices you criticise are in Cdn$?
M$ Office for Mac (Virus Free Edition)
AppleWorks (free w/ every consumer Mac)
Open Office (via X11)
NeoOffice J (Open Office on the Mac w/o X11)
MarinerWrite
Mellel
Nisus Writer
Pages (Part of the iWork bundle)
TextEdit (Comes with EVERY Mac)