Burtzy Loc: Bronx N.Y. & Simi Valley, CA

Chromebooks are all that are used in the classrooms in my city's school system...with the exception of classes that require image-intensive processing, like art and film production. Every Middle School and High School classroom in the Simi Valley School System has a rack of Chromebooks for the students to use. They also do a lot of their online work on Google Classroom and the Chromebooks lend themselves to that usage nicely. Further, the Chromebooks are much cheaper than either the Mac or the PC, regardless of the processor/memory configurations. That is because the kids do all their saving to the Google Drive. The elementary students still use PC's, but that is because they are much older models that have been recycled from classrooms in the Mesozoic period. Eventually, they will all be migrating to Chromebooks.

johnst1001a Loc: West Chester, Ohio

I happened to see the ad for the new Surface, so I went to the Microsoft website to check out the prices. The laptop which has the I7 processor, 16gb ram and 1 tb drive is $3200. The Macpro with the I7, 16gb ram and a 1 tb SSD is $3200. My experience is the Mac's last longer. I have had 3 PC type laptops, longest life was 3 years. Yes, I am a heavy user. Screen failure, motherboard, and a second one just quit, I didn't bother to take it to the store. Macs, I have had 3 macbook pro's. My 2007 lasted until 2017. I could have had it fixed for $400, but it only had 4gb ram. I replaced it with an I7 model, 16 gb, 500 SSD. A second MacPro I had ( my wifes) lasted 7 years. It won't charge the battery, nor run with power cord. She wanted the Ipad, so I never got it checked out. The older models, particularly the 2007 will not run the current operating systems.

wayne barnett Loc: Grants Pass, Oregon

I worked in IT for 35 years in industry and not one company used Apple products as their computer base. Apples are used in schools, as previously pointed out, for reasons of their own. My own machine is a pc. It is about 10 years old and stays on 24/7. Yes it is not as fast or has as much memory as I would like but it has been very reliable and when anything fails I can take it apart and replace any components that may have failed.

Apple being a closed system has had limited SW developed for it whereas IBM created an open source system developed a product that could be mimicked. In the early days we kept am IBM in the office only to verify that any software developed would operate on the IBM platform, the standard. Try running any of the highly technical SW on Apples and you will see the difference. For the longest time the real workhorse SW for industry was written to UNIX, PCs and Apple just did not do it.

Diocletian

Notice that he says the pc is for industry..which i agree with....but, but.....usually students are not working in ‘industry’, so I think the OP’s answer (yeah, along with education’s discounts) still holds.

And I worked in business for xxx (lots of) years. I’ve always had pcs in my office...but now I’m retired and thinking of switching to a mac.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Interesting. My son, who teaches graphic design and photography has all Macs in his student lab, BUT the IT manager is planning to change to PCs citing the cost/performance advantage. My son is NOT happy, but the IT pro does have a point. If I were making this argument to keep the Macs, I’d be pointing out that if you’re going into design/photography video as a profession, many employers will be using Macs as they’re very popular in this (admittedly small) segment of the user marketplace, as the price/performance argument is hard/impossible to refute.

robertjerl Loc: Corona, California

My daughter starts Medical School Aug 1. Both the schools that accepted her required a laptop with a long list of specs. Both "recommended" Dell or another PC laptop but both included specs for Mac for those students who insist on a Mac. They were told that all computers in the school and teaching hospital etc would be PC.

A computer science professor I know told me that the Mac reputation is based on tight control of the build and parts used. This keeps them reliable, but more expensive since the sources are limited (for a year or two I remember there were 3rd party Macs, and they were cheaper, then Apple canceled the building of Macs by other people). My friend stated that PCs could be just as reliable if the build and parts were done right and tend to keep up with the latest and greatest better than the tightly controlled Macs. As a result he said that in his experience Macs tended to be behind the latest tech curve about 1 or more generations. But he also states that 99.99% of all users don't need the latest and greatest. The exception being the Gamers - And almost all of them use PCs which they constantly upgrade etc. The machine I am on now is a 2011 "I Buy Power" gamer that I bought on the idea that if it could run online games in real time it could edit photos. I have upgraded and added more drives, it now has 3 internal and one external. The C drive is SSD. I probably should up the RAM from 16GB to 32 the next time a good brand is on sale. Why, just because, and maybe a video card with more than the 2GB my present one has.
I have always used PCs. We have 4 desk tops and 5 laptops in the family ranging from 1 year to 13 years old and all are working, some faster and some of the older ones cannot run the latest apps well or at all, but those machines had a complete suite of apps and programs long ago and they are still running even if not supported at present. I keep files of the last update download and the original disks just in case. I had two cases of the hard drives having to be replaced - one failed, the other was just too small - I reloaded both after the replacement and they are still chugging along.

hassighedgehog Loc: Corona, CA

Mac/PC, Nikon/Canon (random order) are there any other perennial debates out there in UHH land? I'm sort of neutral. Have a PC because cannot afford Apple and there is more software support for PC. Have had a Canon film camera and a Nikon E995 (1st digital 5 MP) 2 Canon point & shoots, 2 Fujifilm point & shoots, 2 Polaroids, 2 Pentax film cameras, 2 Pentax digital and a Panasonic Lumix DMC ZS60. The Lumix and a Pentax K-50 are current ones in use. The Canon film camera and 2 Pentax film cameras are in storage. The others have either died or were given away.

wapiti Loc: round rock, texas

I'm sure that it's discounts by Apple. Train students on a Mac; they'll probably buy one of their own at a later date. Nothing new, here. You people just won't let it go. I, myself, don't give a "tinkers damn" what brand of computers folks use. I get no commission either way.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

I think your CS professor’s Mac story is what Apple would say as the rationalization for their higher price, but from my experience, the parts are the same IF the PCs are built by reputable companies. An Intel I7-6700 CPU is exactly the same regardless of who buys it. A particular model HD is the same. Resistors from AB, capacitors from CDE are the same, etc. Now I would agree that PC board fabs certainly vary in quality, and parts suppliers vary, but again if you buy a MB from Intel or Dell or HP or Lenovo, I’d guess the QC is as good as Apple. What actually fails on PCs or Macs are HDs, power supplies and (less often) displays. I do think Macs are very nicely packaged, better than most PCs, but not sure if it affects reliability. My opinion is that the higher price of Macs (other than a business and marketing strategy) is due to the closed system nature of the Mac, whereas PCs benefit from the price competitiveness of the open system architecture which has been intrinsic in the PC since the original design and results in literally thousand of third party suppliers of HW and SW for the PC. Apple is doing OK at present as a niche player, but hardly dominating the market like PCs. History has shown us that open systems win in the end - one has only to look at the dominance of Linux in the commercial world as the classic UNIX suppliers (Sun, Dec, DG, etc.) die off. Just my opinion.

I would also add that staying a generation behind the power curve or “bleeding edge” of computing as Apple does has mixed benefits/downsides. You don’t have to continuously redesign and debug new HW and SW, but you lose the advantage of increases in performance and increases in reliability of components. As an example, early SSDs had reliability issues, but now are likely more reliable (and orders of magnitudes faster) than rotating media HDs. As HW capability increases, SW designers constantly add capability to utilize it, so old computer HW is constantly and inevitably becoming obsolete as new SW evolves that requires the new HW. “Investing” in a computer is like investing in meat if you don’t own a refrigerator.

sirlensalot Loc: Arizona

First, neither public nor private schools ever claim to have money. They are always pleading poverty in an attempt to vacuum additional funding from the legislature justified or not. Apples were very popular 10+ years ago for many of the reasons stated by the OP, but the times they are a-changing. Shortages and / or waiting for proprietary parts, down time created when repairs were needed, rising costs, less than ideal support for IT departments eventually caused the school districts to move to PC's. The primary reason as it was stated to me was our techs could get parts faster and the turnover for repairs was faster and significantly cheaper. Personally, I do not think one is significantly better or worse than the other, although I think certain models can be seen as comparably better or worse. Same as cameras IMO.

shelty Loc: Medford, OR

The reason schools use macs is;They either get them free or at a great discount so th at when the students graduate they will buy Mac instead of Windows. Does that make sense?

SteveR Loc: Michigan

The software available for Mac's, however, does not compare to PC's, which is why the business world uses PC's. My last purchase was a MacPro because my son said it was the best computer. However, I bootstrapped Windows10 onto it because I don't like the OS operating system AND I wanted MSWord and Excel among other things. Also, Photoshop is not available on Mac. My daughter just subscribed to Lightroom for $10/mo. on her Mac, but didn't get Photoshop because Mac doesn't support it. I think it's kind of cheeky on Adobe's part to charge the full $10 but only give half of what is available to PC users. The other thing that I liked about Dell was in-home repairs. I will say, though, that Apple has excellent customer service, even when your computer is out of warranty. When you get to that point, Dell sucks. Overall, Microsoft customer service doesn't come so high as suck. Maybe a MacPro running Windows 10 isn't so bad after all.

jjdeis

Apple also established a foothold in the school districts because they donated them to the schools early on.

bpulv Loc: Buena Park, CA

How old is your daughter's Mac? Unless it is at least ten years old or she has not uploaded and installed Apples free OS updates, both Lightroom CC and Photoshop CC will run on it. The majority of photographers who have Macs run some version of both LR and PS. If she wants to use Photoshop CC, all she should have to do is download and install it. The problem is probably not that Photoshop CC will not run on her Mac, it is most likely that she has either failed to do something or done something wrong. If she goes to the Adobe.com website, clicks on the "contact us" tab and enters her Adobe CC (Creative Cloud) account number, they will helper her identify and fix the problem without charge either by real time text or by phone. I have done this myself and they have always come through.