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Comment by insaneirish | Hacker News Reader

> If you are making purchase decisions for classrooms, what makes you buy 200 Macs with a new, unknown architecture?

Yes, the "unknown" architecture powering the highest performing phones and tablets.

Apple has plenty of problems selling to schools for classroom use because other platforms have invested more in that use case. But ISA being the reason? No. Simply no.

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Have you ever been behind the purchase choice for dozens of computers? Hundreds?

IT managers are conservative, if they make a bad call, they have to support crap equipment for the next 5+ years or so. Yes, I'm aware Apple's CPUs are in the iPhone and iPad, but it's a huge change for the Mac and it's a big risk for people making those purchase decisions.

As for this, I have, and I certainly would not buy for the first two-three (if not more) hardware revisions after such a major architecture change until I could evaluate how that hardware has been working out for the early adopter guinea pigs. I'd also need to see where everything stood concerning software, especially the educational software that has been getting written almost entirely for x86 systems or specifically targeting Chromebooks for the last 5+ years. Even then I am not sure the Technology Director is going to be anything but skeptical about running everything in VMs or Docker containers. Chromebooks are cheap, reasonably functional, easy to replace, and already run all district educational software.

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