Question: how do you provide tech support for 34,000 junior high school kids with notebook computers if you're constrained by limited public funding? Well, if those notebooks are Wintels, you can pay for additional support staff by eliminating certain nonessentials from the school budget-- stuff like textbooks, lab supplies, history classes (hey, the past is the past-- why dwell on it?), heat, and cafeteria substances that qualify technically as "food." If the laptops are iBooks, on the other hand, you're better off just conning the kids into doing the tech support themselves. It's cheap and you get newspaper coverage and everything.

Faithful viewer Peter Krug tipped us off to a Portland Press Herald article about the state of Maine's first line of defense against iBook "issues" that crop up in class: what the teachers are calling "iTeams," groups of tech-savvy students who are willing to lend a hand when things go awry. Dropped from the AirPort network? Don't bug the teacher; an iTeam classmate can get you all wirelessed up again. Can't print? No worries-- iTeam to the rescue. Trouble circumventing the school's porn filter? Once again, iTeam is there. The iTeam members get a kick out of helping, and the teachers responsible for keeping everything running gain an invaluable resource for fixing small problems, configuring large numbers of systems, and test-flying new software before it gets rolled out to the other, lesser students.

The brilliant bit is that the thirteenish-year-old iTeam members tend to be (rather unsurprisingly, really) far more knowledgeable about the iBooks than the teachers themselves are, and so they frequently find themselves helping the staff connect a Mac to an LCD projector and the like. We love what this must be doing to the balance of power; just wait'll these kids figure out that they can unionize (iTeamsters?) and strike for pizza twice a week and a certain "flexibility" in homework due dates. Nothing beats a technocracy except a technocracy ruled by early teens.

So there's Apple technology at work, once more making the world a better place. We don't mean to imply, of course, that Maine's seventh- and eighth-graders couldn't still do tech support if the laptops were Wintels instead of Macs; indeed, we're sure those kids are packing all sorts of high-tech know-how these days, and it's not just limited to byzantine cheat codes for Heartmuncher 3: Quest for Ketchup. But with the increased problem load 34,000 Wintels would bring compared to the same number of Macs, forget about having an iTeam of eight students to support a class of 200. If Maine had gone with Dells instead of Macs, the state would be busing in extra students by the thousand from New Hampshire just to have enough kids to handle the load, and then you have to feed them and put them somewhere, and... seriously, they're better off with the Macs. Trust us.