OIT may add more Apple desktops to clusters

Macs have outstripped PCs in laptop sales through the University’s Student Computer Initiative (SCI), which sold three Macs for every two PCs last fall.“

The percent of Macs on campus has grown significantly,” said Steven Sather, OIT’s director of support services. “Five years ago there were about 10 percent of the computers that were Macs. That number has grown by a little over 10 to 15 percent each year to this year.” He estimated that about 40 percent of the student body owns Macs.

Macs have traditionally been more attractive to college students than to the average American consumer because of their aesthetic appeal and because Apple targets the student demographic in its advertising campaign.

The introduction of the Windows Vista operating system last year offered a more aesthetically appealing desktop than previous Windows systems. The growing popularity of Macs, however, remains relatively unaffected. Users are unearthing technical problems with Vista, and Apple also introduced its own system upgrade, Leopard, in October 2007.

Leopard offers users new features but keeps its characteristic appearance. The operating system includes features such as “Spaces,” which allows users to organize applications and remove desktop clutter, and “Time Machine,” which lets users access their computer systems exactly as they appeared the previous day.

For Yi Liao ’11, who bought her first Mac through SCI last fall, the new operating system has costs and benefits. “Printing is such a pain now because the popup program that works with the cluster printers doesn’t work with Leopard,” she said. “Otherwise, it’s pretty cool. I like the mail [features] they incorporated — when people e-mail you stuff, you can immediately add those events to the calendar. Little details like that — it’s a lot smoother.”

Mac’s newest laptop model, the MacBook Air, is only .76 inches thick when closed, and its lightweight portability appeals to students. Sather said that though OIT has not yet determined which models will be offered through SCI next year, the MacBook Air will be considered as one of the options.

A criticism of Windows Vista was that older PCs were not powerful enough to run the new operating system. On the other hand, a new program called Boot Camp is automatically configured with Leopard and allows users to run both Windows and Leopard on their Mac computers, choosing which system to run at startup.

The University provides Macs and PCs for student use in campus facilities and in the computer clusters. When purchasing new machines, OIT takes into consideration that “we want computers in the clusters to last for three years before we replace them,” Sather said. “We’ve been upping the number of Macs in the labs to more closely align with the number of Macs owned by students.”

With Macs’ new ability to run both systems, however, replacing all PCs with Macs in the future might afford the University a practical and cost-saving alternative.

“We’re looking at how we can use Boot Camp effectively in places like clusters,” Sather said, but “looking at a computer cluster that just has Macs in it would be a couple years down the road.”