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School's out: Time to order new Macs, or wait?

29.06.2006
As teachers and college faculty members pack up their classrooms for the summer, educational IT staffers face the prospect of ordering new equipment and software -- and planning how to deploy new computers and redeploy existing workstations. Typically, this time of year is spent reviewing budgets and how to get the most bang for a school's IT bucks, as well as how best to allocate resources throughout classrooms and labs this fall.

With the arrival this year of Apple's Intel-based Macs, those calculations involve a new set of questions -- the same kinds of questions enterprises face on an ongoing basis.

Typically, Mac-centric IT staffers simply focus on replacing the oldest Macs on hand -- either directly or by replacing their high-end Macs and letting those trickle down to replace slightly older models until the very oldest are phased out. With Mac OS X's highly portable nature, systems administrators need not necessarily develop new deployment disk images for those newer Macs because the old image will usually boot most Mac models (although some updating and tweaking may be needed).

However, Intel-based Macs -- which now include everything but Apple's top-end desktop systems -- pose two problems. First, they will require a separate set of disk images for deployment. Apple has yet to release a Universal version of Mac OS X (though the company has stated that this is an eventual goal, most likely to be introduced next year in Leopard - Mac OS X 10.5). As a result, Mac OS X images are no longer portable between older Power PC Macs and and the newest crop of Apple hardware.

Some users and administrators have managed to craft universal Mac OS X configurations and images. However, the potential problems of this unsupported Mac OS X configuration (which doesn't function properly with Software Update) should keep them out of a live production environment. While maintaining multiple image sets may be a lot of work, it is by far the best approach in terms of stability, security and troubleshooting any operating system or application problems -- regardless of whether the problems are a result of the home-grown configuration.

That means extra thought needs to go into any allocation of Intel Macs or any decision to postpone a Mac upgrade until 2007 in the hopes that a universal Mac OS X release will be available. Delaying upgrades presents its own problems as Power PC-based Macs become scarce. It may be difficult by then to locate PowerBook G4s, iBooks, iMac G5s and Mac minis. Older minis have pretty much disappeared from Apple's order book and even though eMacs are still available to education, they're reportedly in short supply and could soon be replaced with a similarly designed Intel eMac.