Macintosh Computers Wage Comeback with New Models

History has been marked by great rivalries: Athens and Sparta, Guelf and Ghibelline, Lancaster and York, Harvard and Yale--and PC and Macintosh. But not all of these contests are consigned to the past.

Despite hard times for Apple Computers, the company's most recent sales are healthy. That's good news for Macintosh users at Harvard who have seen the number of student Macintosh users fall off in recent years, according to a recently released survey on 1998 computer usage on campus conducted by the Harvard Arts and Sciences Computer Services (HASCS).

The survey found that nearly a third of seniors use Macintoshes. However, only about 22 percent of computers owned by juniors are Macintoshes. Those numbers drop to 13 percent for sophomores and 12 percent for first-years.

In the past five years, Apple's national market share fell from 10.6 percent in 1995 to a mere 4 percent last August.

In the last six months, however, the robust sales of Apple's new candy-colored wonder, the iMAC, propelled its national market share to about 10 percent once again.

If the buying habits of Harvard students reflect national trends, then the effects of iMAC's popularity might just influence the next wave of first-years that go tech-shopping.

In the early days of personal computing, Apple enjoyed a privileged place in University technology. A dozen years ago, Apple and a several universities, including Harvard, were organized in a consortium, according to Franklin M. Steen, director of FAS computer services.

"They worked to develop software for instruction," Steen says. "The Macintoshes were the machines with the easy-to-use interface and had networking capabilities built in. In the meantime, PCs have an easy-to-use interface and networking capabilities."

Now that PCs have at least approached Macintoshes in user friendliness and networking capabilities, the need for diversity in University computer platforms is twofold, Steen explains.

New Macintoshes are bought relative to the proportion of their respective student users. For example, when Harvard last bought their latest slew of new machines in fall 1997, there were two new Macintoshes bought for every three new IBM-compatible computers.

In addition, HASCS continues to use years-old software because they can only run on Apple computers.

"We will continue to have them in our public area for quite a while, because there's some instructional software that only runs on the Macintosh...There's enough of it that we feel we have to have a Mac presence in the labs," Steen says.

But as Macintoshes become rarer in student dorms, what is important for their users is that they have access to user assistants who are proficient in working with their computer systems. HASCS says that this isn't a problem.

"We fully support both the Macintosh and the Windows 95/98 PC platforms, and our user assistant staff is trained in both to the same level," says Rick Osterberg '96, coordinator of residential computing support.

"Perhaps the only disadvantage is the obvious one-Macintosh users don't have a lot of peers who also have Macintosh computers, so it's harder to share files and programs," he adds.

Andrew L. Perito '0lis one such demanding user. A Macintosh devotee, he avows the superiority of the Apple over the PC.

And by using a PC emulator, Perito can make his computer run PC programs just as a PC would.

"I can't see anything that would make me change over to PC. I use a PC at work if I have to, but I'd rather my MAC and run a PC emulator," Perito says.

But in spite of such options for MAC diehards, Apple's foothold among Harvard students has been slipping.

PCs offer a wealth of software that may not be initially written in MAC language, and for Christina Yoon '01, the wide choices were enough to win her over to PCs.

"I wanted to get a laptop," she said, "and researching between G3 and all the other PC laptops, and it ended up that the PCs were a lot cheaper and had a better variety--more companies to choose from, better styles, better options."

But as the recent success of the iMAC shows, there's little can be said certainly about the future of high-tech business.

"Of course, years down the road, it's entirely possible that just the opposite could happen," Osterberg says.

"Macintosh could prove to be a very dominant player in the market, and Windows could be the one to phase out," he adds.