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The choice used to be pretty easy: If you had
a kid and you were shopping for a home computer, you
got a Mac because schools were all about Macs. Teachers
loved them (they were easy to set up and support), kids
adored them (the Mac interface was friendlier and more
intuitively designed), and there was plenty of educational
Mac software.
All of that’s still true, but the Mac’s
share of the educational market, which has been on the
wane for years, has lately dropped to less than half
that of dominant Dell’s. And since, like Dell,
all the other runners-up make PCs that run the Microsoft
Windows operating system (only Apple makes machines
that run Apple’s operating system), the educational
market is now skewed 85 percent toward Windows. It’s
Bill Gates’s world, and we all just learn in it.
Is your child, then, at a disadvantage if he
or she attends a school that uses Macs? Are you a bad
parent if you’re seduced—as many parents
are—by the unmatched aesthetic superiority of
iMacs (those all-in-one flat-screen units are irresistible)
and the ease-of-use of the latest Mac operating system
(which has earned rapturous reviews from the technical
press)?
Nah. Windows was inspired by Mac’s operating
system, and most kids (unlike some adults) won’t
have any problem moving back and forth between the two.
Also, you can buy Windows-emulation software called
Virtual PC (about $220 from your local computer store,
or visit connectix.com), which will let you run most
Windows software on your Mac. (Sorry, there’s
no such thing as Mac-emulation software for PCs.)
Even if you end up with a mix of Macs and PCs,
the good news is that the latest update of Mac’s
operating system—version 10.2, nicknamed “Jaguar”—lets
you effortlessly share files between them. One more
thing: Apple computers (which have been referred to
as the “BMWs of computers”) used to be priced
considerably higher than comparable PCs, but those new
iMacs, starting at $1,299, are competitively priced.
And for students just starting out doing homework research
on the Web (not to mention all that IMing and e-mailing),
the $799 eMac—packed with Apple’s most popular
applications—is a great bargain.
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