White boxes in schools
Actually, I think schools are rather large consumers of white boxes. This is by no means a scientific sample, but both my son's parochial school and the public school where my wife works buy all or nearly all their computers from local screwdriver shops. My wife's school is part of a district with a bunch of Wintel dweebs that constantly mouth the "we won't support it if it doesn't meet our specs" line, which strongly discourages the teachers from buying anything but the IT staff's preferred platform, which is a white box. My son's school is on its own, and their IT staff is composed of a Wintel network admin plus me, who helps with the Win2KPro clients and maintains the Macs myself, both of us on a volunteer basis. Actually, this school hasn't had to buy a computer in quite some time, as all but one of their Macs are ~8 years old, several of which (also including a brand-new G3 iMac) were donated, and most of the PCs were purchased under the auspices of an educational grant.
In any case, nearly all the PCs in both schools are white boxes. And I do not believe these cases are particularly isolated. |
