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Teachers Score Yet Again (1/30/03)
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For the love of Pete's knees, teachers sure are getting the sweet end of the Apple-flavored lollipop these days! In addition to qualifying for reduced educational pricing on all Apple gear (as per the usual), you may recall that last October Apple launched the "X for Teachers" program, which sought to distribute copies of Mac OS X 10.2 to all qualifying U.S. and Canadian K-12 teachers for free. And not just "free plus $19.95 shipping and handling," but free free-- and Apple recently extended the program through the end of March, so if you're a teacher and you haven't yet scored your free dose of Jaguary goodness, it's not too late to hop on the gravy train.
But wait, there's more: Apple just announced another new deal, which offers teachers a copy of iLife and Keynote for the ridiculously low price of just fifteen bucks. That's a savings of $133-- or 90%, for the math teachers out there-- off the retail price ($113 or 88% off the educational price), and as far as we can make out, shipping is free, although sales tax is extra. Now, yeah, this may not be as something-for-nothing as the X for Teachers deal, but considering that fifteen clams isn't even enough to score yourself a copy of the Girls Gone Wild: Spring Break video, why not blow it on a suite of digital lifestyle apps and presentation software that PowerPoint can only hope to become in a future life if it saves a busload of blind schoolchildren and nuns from plunging into a ravine?
The point is, if you're a teacher, this is another terrific deal from Apple, whose plan to re-establish itself as the education sales king apparently involves treating educators like royalty; we can only assume that the next deal will involve Steve Jobs coming over every weekend to wash your car. There's just one teensy little flaw with Apple's plan, however: it's not the teachers who decide which computers go into the schools. We know, because about 12.2% of AtAT's weekly mail volume is comprised of rants from Mac-loving teachers who are plotting torture and mayhem against the administrators who just decided that all Macs would be stripped from the classrooms and placed into a large vat of acid, as per the school district's new contract with Dell. While it's always nice to have the teachers on one's side, if Apple really wants to get back in the education game, the company should be bribing the administrators with free operating systems, cheap presentation software, and (ideally) large wads of unmarked bills. Maybe next time around.
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 1/30/03 episode: January 30, 2003: Does Apple's latest LCD display really require Jaguar to work? Meanwhile, Apple will sell you last year's Power Macs for a mere $100 more than the current models, and U.S. teachers score again, this time with an iLife-Keynote bundle that's just about cheaper than dirt...
Other scenes from that episode: 3907: Pretty Steep Requirements (1/30/03) Starved for Apple-flavored angst in the tedium-soaked wake of yet another bygone Stevenote? Perhaps the new Power Macs aren't providing enough fodder for you. In days gone by, Mac fanatics would jump at the chance to criticize a new Power Mac's speed boost as trivial, laughable, or downright ruinous in the face of the ever-advancing Intel juggernaut, and indeed, one would think that this latest boost to 1.42 GHz would stir all manner of online punditry bemoaning Apple's continuing inability to scare up clock speeds even half of what's available from the Dark Side... 3908: The Going Price Of Nostalgia (1/30/03) Speaking of the ongoing tussle between Mac OS X and Mac OS 9, remember how Apple announced that all new Macs introduced starting this month would no longer boot into 9? Remember also how Quark is now so late porting XPress, it's become evident that the process is being undertaken by two monkeys with typewriters on loan from the Complete Works of Shakespeare Project and some guy named Lou who once programmed an Excel macro in a business school class with Fred Ebrahimi's nephew?...
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