Apple is stepping up its efforts in the education market with a new promotion for schools called "X for Teachers." This program will literally give not-for-resale copies of Jaguar away to eligible teachers (see Apple’s rules for this offer for eligibility and other requirements). Those teachers will also get copies of iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, and "Mac OS 9 for Classic support and a Getting Started with Mac OS X Training CD." From the press release:
Apple® today announced its "X for Teachers" program that gives a free copy of Mac® OS X version 10.2 "Jaguar" to every K-12 teacher in the U.S. "Jaguar" combines a stable and robust UNIX-based foundation with Macintosh’s legendary ease-of-use to create the world’s most advanced operating system for teaching, learning and administration. The free copy of "Jaguar" is accompanied by free copies of Apple’s Digital Hub applications–iMovie™ for digital video editing, iPhoto™ for organizing and sharing digital photos and iTunes™ for building a digital audio library.
"Getting Jaguar and a training CD for free makes it easy for teachers to move to Mac OS X, so they can spend more time using technology in the classroom and less time making it all work," said John Couch, Apple’s vice president of Education. "Apple has delivered innovative products to teachers and schools for over 25 years, and Mac OS X is our best ever."
Mac OS X v10.2 "Jaguar" delivers a number of innovative applications and features to teachers, including:
- Apple’s innovative iPhoto, iMovie and iTunes applications that bring the Digital Hub to the classroom for easy integration of digital media into lessons and presentations;
- Sherlock® 3, Apple’s all-new Internet services tool that makes it easy to find and display some of the most practical and useful information available on the Internet with a variety of "channels" like dictionary, thesaurus and language translation;
- Address Book, a central database for student, parent and colleague contacts that allows users to enter information just once and access it from other applications;
- a new Mail application that features junk mail filtering to identify and flag junk e-mail messages, especially those that contain material inappropriate for schools;
- Universal Access features that exceed Section 508 requirements with the ability to magnify the screen, have highlighted text read aloud and use special keyboard commands such as mouse keys, sticky keys and slow keys; and
- unprecedented stability and performance from advanced features such as true protected memory, preemptive multitasking and advanced memory management.
With nearly 4,000 native Mac OS X applications available, including hundreds of education-specific applications, educators have a wealth of third party solutions to use in the classroom. Mac OS X also preserves previous investments with a compatibility environment called "Classic" that allows educators to run older Mac OS 9 applications.
Qualifying teachers receive Mac OS X v10.2 "Jaguar," Mac OS 9 for Classic support and a Getting Started with Mac OS X Training CD. Mac OS X v10.2 "Jaguar" requires a minimum of 128MB of memory and is designed to run on the following Apple products: eMac™, iMac®, iBook®, Power Macintosh® G3, Power Mac® G4 and any PowerBook® introduced after May 1998.
There is more information at Apple’s Web site about the offer, including the page of eligibility requirements. Apple says that teachers will not pay anything for this, as the offer includes free shipping and handling. The offer is valid from October 17th to December 31st of this year.
The Mac Observer Spin:
This is a great move by Apple, and one that could really help them in the education market. Lots of teachers use Macs at home, but many of them do not follow the industry. They may not know about Mac OS X, and most never would bother to upgrade the OS that came on their system anyway. This offer from Apple will put the best OS on the planet in their hands, help them understand how much use it might be for them in the classroom, and show those teachers that Apple considers them to be important. The value in that can not be emphasized enough.
The teachers win, and Apple will renew some ties to teachers, ties that were damaged when Apple pulled all of its education sales in house back in 2000. Apple has yet to recover from the way it made that move, but this move will win Apple support from more teachers.