Also, it’s easy to forget about the total cost of ownership (i.e. When you’re talking about buying computers for a school, you want more than just the cheapest machine you can get, you want one that works when you turn it on, doesn’t get infected with malware, so that teachers can be focused on educating kids and not being a tech support guru. Macs are reliable machines that are well designed and hold up to abuse relatively well.
So they switched the 9–12 high schoolers over to Dells and even though they were cheaper per unit, they ended up spending a LOT more in support, repairs and other things than they had been when they were on the iBooks. After several years someone thought it would be a good idea to switch to Dells because they were a little bit cheaper. Our local district bought Apple iBooks for grades 6–12 and had a lot of success with it.
