That has not been my experience at school. Most people bring their computers from home, and I never met a single person with a Mac. Heck, instructions for how to get your computer online will include PC instructions, and tell you to call support for a Mac. Heck, we actually had problems with our security with Macs, because people were less acquainted with how they worked.
The Macs I’ve seen were either quite ancient, or bought by the university for multimedia purposes.
I’ve never noticed. In my experience, it’s been nearly half-and-half Dell/HP. My guess would be whether the company is buying or leasing, and who has the contracts locally. The people who do the purchasing are swayed by local service, saving money through leasing, or price, but not necessarily consistently. One boss might like one feature, another boss likes another feature.
Anecdotally:
Boss #1: smart guy, tried to save money where he could without sacrificing quality. He got a service contract with a local company who leased HP’s. That company also serviced the servers and copy machine. He leased 3 lots of HP’s, 8-10 at a time, with the idea to send them back every 3 years for newer computers.
Boss #2: idiot, couldn’t tell up from down. Only bought from Dell. He also bought only Isuzu cars. He always wanted to get the cheapest possible solution, regardless of quality.
Boss #3: another idiot. However, this guy told the computer guy to buy the computers. For whatever reason, the computer guy chose Dell. However, this year, the computer guy started buying Thinkpads when the Dells started falling apart.
Superhal,
Boss #1 leased 8 HPs at a time, once a year? 24 computers total?
Was this the English department at a school or something, or were you working here?
The thread is about what computers the institutions buy, not what students are buying. Do the University of Virginia computer labs have Macs? Or is it 400 Dells and a couple of Macs?
Most of these answers are dancing around the short answer: low bid contracts.
Federal government entities are bound by the FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulations) which mandate that agencies’ procurement offices solicit bids for goods and services. Contracts are usually awarded using the criteria of price as the first consideration, and it counts as something like 90% of the scoring for the contract. Quality of merchandise is a distant second. Most states adopt some variation of the FAR for their own procurement processes, because in almost all cases state entities are using government money to some extent and must comply with federal regs in order to spend it.
I personally hated the Dell PCs that we had to use (this was a few years ago). They were noisy and the USB ports were hidden behind a flap near the floor. The laptops I used later were somewhat better.
The OP said it was about the computers found on site, and the computers found on site at a university will overwhelmingly be computers bought by individuals, not by the institution. The physics department here, for instance, has a computer lab with 10 PCs (dual-boot Windows and Linux) and a smattering of servers, but most of the ~100 faculty and grad students have a computer of their own on their desks, and most also have one or more computers at home.
At the University of Illinois they were mostly Dells. By OS is was Windows>Linux>>Mac. At least in the engineering campus.
In my experience this is not an issue for corporate customers who will simply replace a system as soon as it fails once the warranty expires. (Practically speaking, it’s not worth it to spend the money on repairing an out-of-warranty system.)
Back when I was at Michigan the school bought 95% Apple. I think Apple was using it as a loss leader back then. Get everybody on campus using them by providing them cheep. Then when those folks start buying computers for themselves and their companies they are used to apple and put their money there.
I’ve also noticed this. Every CS department I’ve ever visited in the UK is almost always exclusively Dell.
Think they were spread out in 6 month increments, but not every year had a lease expiration.
Not that school. I think the school had around 40+ computers total, including for workers.
The IT folks where I work say this is the deciding factor. They may not always be the best, but they are consistent and easy. If one does break, one call and replacement part/machine is there the next day. No questions asked. In our shop software isn’t an issue, everything is controlled by the sysadmins or the users. Where the machines come from doesn’t enter the software equation. For hardware, Dell has an easy and consistent solution. The price is competitive or the best price, so that doesn’t cause an issue either.
It’s in the interests of your company’s IT department to have the same computers throughout the enterprise. It’s a lot easier to support them that way. So it’s something that would be pushed internally rather than by the hardware supplier.
Not here. I think you’ll find many more computers on the desks of staff than faculty. I assume by “their own” you mean purchased with grant money? Where does your faculty go for tech support?
This, plus (for our company at least) easy credit terms early in our existence.
Professors mostly buy with grant money, but grad students usually pay out-of-pocket just like anyone else, unless their advisor’s got a lot of money available. In either case, it’s the person who will be using the computer who decides what to get.
For tech support, the physics department has an IT coordinator on staff, independent of the school’s IT department. And one of the research groups even has an IT guy of their own, though he works closely with the department’s guy. Though I don’t know how standard this is, since we’re the richest department on campus.
The company I used to work has been a Dell shop for the last 10-12 years. I found that Dell computers were really easy to work on, especially the Optiplex models. Tool free cases and a lot of the parts were on hinges so you could easily get to the parts you wanted to work on.
I would except the Dimension models that had angled USB ports on the front. That was a brain dead design choice.
OTOH, I’ve had some HP models that I’d have to half disassemble them just to insert some memory.
More anecdotal evidence:
I commute to and from Chicago and have a rather large group of friends and acquaintances that usually ride with me. The people that ride the train are across the spectrum in terms of business areas they work in and what work they do in that business area.
Out of the people that have corporate issued laptops, I’ve seen a couple people who work together using Dells. I’ve seen another pair of coworkers using HP, but the clear majority is IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads.
Chalk me up as another person who clearly sees the OP as asking about large-scale purchases, regardless of how we can nitpick the meaning of “on-site” computers so that it could theoretically include computers that individuals have bought on their own and brought to the location. :rolleyes:
The public labs at my university were mostly PCs (probably Dells). The new library was probably about 2/3 PC and 1/3 Mac. The CompSci labs mostly ran other OSes–e.g., there was a lab full of JavaStations running Solaris, and another lab running some flavor of Linix I can’t remember. The company I work for now uses mostly Dells with a few Thinkpads and such. Probably some Macs in certain departments that would need them for design work.
What’s Solaris?