Mac vs. PCThe study of how Macs compare to PCs
 Introduction PC myths debunked What you can do What can Apple do? Carteret Co. School District The man behind the site



In 1994 a $29 million bond (approved by the taxpayers of Carteret County, North Carolina) authorized our school district to modernize their technology program and to make a substantial investment in computers. A committee of citizens was then asked to assist in the decision of how to spend this money.

After researching all aspects of the educational computer business (including having presentations by several PC assemblers), these independent citizens recommended that the school district standardize on Macintosh computers — and that is what happened.
Note: None of these persons had any affiliation with Apple Computer, and few of them owned Macs.

Several years after this, in mid 2000, rather “out of the blue”, the school district decided to standardize on PCs, and to replace all their existing Macs (through “attrition”). Their carefully-worded plan amounts to abandoning a $10,000,000± taxpayer investment in Macintosh hardware, software, training, peripherals, networking, etc. This drastic change came about due to the persistence of one or two of the District’s senior tech support people who were anti-Mac from the beginning.

So What?
The gist of our concerns is that our local School District is making a significant mistake in switching our schools’ computers from Macs to PCs. We believe that this decision is detrimental to everyone involved: students, teachers, tech support people, and taxpayers. Read this for more elaboration.

Here is a VERY small sample of a few commentaries, etc. about this local issue:

  • One of the first local newspaper reports. This was a reasonably accurate summary of the situation as of 4/01.
  • An article by BusinessWeek magazine.
  • A story by MacCentral. This also has links to two prior MacCentral write-ups.
  • Opinions: a local newspaper editor expresses his personal opinions, and our response.
  • A featured write-up on the Wired site.

    • [In the beginning we tried to educate school board members, etc. about this issue by giving them printouts of reports concerning this matter. After copying and handing out over a thousand pages of documents it became clear that this wasn’t the way to go.

    We then tried referencing them to websites where reports or studies were published. Since there were a great many of these, it soon became apparent that they weren’t about to track down numerous links. My conclusion was that a single website was needed to collect and organize these reports, studies and articles. That was the origination of MacvsPC.Info.]

— This Is Our Position —

When all the facts are viewed objectively, the evidence is overwhelming that e-v-e-r-y-o-n-e associated with the school system will benefit significantly more from standardizing on Macintosh computers vs Windows/PCs.

With this in mind, the concerned citizens have been asking
the Board of Education and the school district to do just ONE THING:
to review this decision in a PROFESSIONAL manner
(i.e. open, unbiased, thorough and well-documented).


Many people have written me as to the current status of this situation. Unfortunately,so far, the school board has not been in favor of having a professional review of this matter — in fact they have worked hard to avoid one. The net affect is that the anti-Mac technology people (2) are gradually replacing the Macs in the Carteret school system.

Although this could change (with more enlightened school board people being elected, a change in the district’s technology leadership, etc.), for the moment the powers-that-be are more concerned about justifying their position than to do what is best for all involved...