Yale Daily News reports on how Windows is increasingly being pushed aside by MacOS X and Linux. According to the article, Yale Information Technology Services’ registration records show that nearly 20 percent of University students and 33 percent of faculty choose Macs over Windows PCs. This is quite a change from the late 90s, when University IT departments made news by trying to eliminate Macs from their campuses.
So what’s going on?
Max Engel ’06, a Mac user and computing assistant, said choosing a computer was difficult for him because he had experience with both Macs and Windows PCs, but frustration with bugs, crashes and general unpleasantness that plagued his Windows experience outweighed the cost of the Apple PowerBook he purchased.
What’s Yale’s official position?
ITS has remained relatively neutral in recommending incoming freshmen to purchase one brand over the other. There are computer clusters for Windows, Linux and Mac computers, and ITS has discount programs for both Apple and Dell.
[Philip Long, Yale’s director of ITS] said that ITS does not try to show favoritism to one brand in meeting the different computing demands of students and faculty. But for most students, the decision comes down to whether or not it can get the job done
And what about Linux?
The computer science students are said to love it, and the article notes that security problems with Windows are among the reasons people are considering both Linux and Mac OS X. According to the article, “Yale recently moved its e-mail system to Linux servers,” but it doesn’t say why or where from. It does say, however:
“Linux is really exploding in the back-office area with servers,” Long said. “We can see the source for it — we know what’s going on. It’s economic, and colleagues at other universities are using it as well, so we can learn from them, too.”
The Mac vs. PC debate will continue, but I’d like to get one thing straight: Macs cost less than equivalently configured PCs, or at least they cost about the same.