UVa First-Year Student Computer Inventory: 1997-2008 Comparison | Hacker News Reader

UVa First-Year Student Computer Inventory: 1997-2008 Comparison

itc.virginia.edu

36 pointsMaysonL19 comments

That last graph is one of those "holy shit" types of revelations. MS should be scared spitless.

I own a coffee shop near Florida State, I would call it pretty near 50/50 Mac vs. Windows.

I am pretty sure freshmen are required to have a laptop and the Mac bundle deals at the computer store are pretty irresistible.

According to http://www.fsucs.com/ the Apple bundles are cheaper than Dell or Sony which are the only other options.

So Apple is discounting for students, looking to snare them for life.

Also this is posted "Due to circumstances beyond our control, all Apple orders may experience a significant delay."

Can't make'em fast enough!

> scared spitless

If the infamous 2007 Missouri School of Journalism lecture hall photo has not already:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/psiko/1473644932/

http://blogs.eweek.com/applewatch/content/macbook/is_apples_...

Dang, I never knew that photo was from Mizzou. I grew up 45 minutes from Columbia, MO, and most of my high school class attends there.

For some reason I thought that photo was from the 2005 Startup School.

I literally said that to myself when I saw it.

"MS should be scared spitless."

From 1997-2009, I called on about 100 customer sites.

From this small, but faily representative, sample, the percentage of corporate desktops does not appear to have changed much:

1997: Windows 99% Mac 1%

2009 Windows 99% Mac 1%

The only people using Macs are designers, engineers, and a few programmers. They insist on them for their specialties. Everyone else gets a PC with Windows.

In the corporate world, MS doesn't have anything to worry about (yet).

I think this where the compensating trends of students preferring laptops to desktops is coming into play. OS X has a better laptop experience. I hate waiting for Windows to come out of hibernation. I hate waiting for Linux drivers to appear and work. It's nice having the reliable drop off service at the Apple store, since laptops break more frequently. Apple simply doesn't sell "normal" desktop computers...

Except trends flow from present undergrads to companies, not the other way around.

Hence the "(yet)".

A problem that is obvious and growing should be "worried about" immediately. If you wait till the problem is gone and you've lost, it's too late.

At my last job (at a company of 500), I used MS for office tools, OSes, and server side services like mail.

At my startup, as the "IT" guy, I live on google for free and Apple for cheap. I curse under my breath when I get a Word Doc or PowerPoint instead of a PDF. My company can scale to 500 on these practices, which means Microsoft has a great deal to worry about. Right now.

[edit: correction, I use Windows on a cheap PC to periodically test how broken IE is. Soon that will be a convenient web service]

I'm surprised by the operating systems graph, I didn't think Mac OS would have gone up that much and I especially thought "Other" would be much higher or at least increasing by any amount.

I wonder how that relates to what type of school University of Virginia is as I know nothing about it. It would be interesting to see how that compares to Stanford, MIT and the like.

As a student who is in that dataset, I think it makes sense. Basically, UVa is a pretty preppy school and Macs are really trendy right now. From my friends and what I see on grounds, I'm surprised that the Mac ownership is not numerically higher. We also focus on the liberal arts, which helps Mac. Linux is a real pain to get to work on the network. The decline in "other" is probably in a large part the result of Mac OS providing a very decent Unix/programming environment. I do see CS professors pretty split between Mac and Linux.

I'd imagine that schools that are more engineering focused schools would probably use more Linux, but I would not be surprised if Mac has converted a lot of them as well.

For the record, I had three computers windows, linux, and mac for most of last year, and I was one of the 8 "others" on that chart.

I think you're remiss in not mentioning that UVA has very strong science and engineering programs.

(This is a bit surreal, as I did my undergrad at Virginia Tech, my Master's at W&M, and now my PhD back at Tech. I've never cared for the rivalries, but I didn't think I'd ever feel compelled to defend UVA to one of its own students.)

The business school isn't too shabby either http://www.virginia.edu/uvatoday/newsRelease.php?id=7870

Yeah, I am a former linux laptop user who switched Mac a while back.

Kudos to those 8 kids with "other" OS.

"UVa is a pretty preppy school"

I'd give you +20 karma if I could.

Also a member of the dataset.

Am I the only person who looks at the first table and wonders who was the lone first-year student in 2008 who didn't own a computer?

The college I'm attending makes owning a Macbook Pro mandatory. I wonder how many colleges actively deny use of a Mac, especially considering Boot Camp.

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