Today’s College Student Opts for a Mac Not a Dell

Kiley Dorton, a UGA Senior, posted a very interesting blog the other day about the major shift he’s experienced in campus technology, and why he thinks there has been a mass migration away from the PC to the Mac. The great thing about Kiley’s blog is that it is located solidly within the student’s worldview, and the student’s experience. This isn’t a marketing or PR company telling us why Macs are better. This is a student’s first-hand observation. First, he gives a bit of history,

“When I came to college in the Fall of ‘04, I had a 12″ PowerBook G4 and, needless to say, it was the envy of everyone in my dorm hall. While all the other guys on the hall had their $500 Dells and HP’s big enough to play poker on and slow enough that pen and paper might just be faster, I was surrounded by beautiful women in awe of my tiny, shiny, powerful Mac (the term ‘women’ is used here in a very loose sense, and can be taken as ‘other nerds’ or ‘imaginary women’ if necessary). Not only was I the only kid on the hall who could edit skateboarding movies, make web pages, and successfully take my laptop to class and back, I was one of very few college freshmen with a Mac instead of a Windows machine.” But boy, has that all changed. Over the last four years, he says, computing on campus has made a dramatic change.

“From black and blue Dell notebooks to shiny white MacBooks; from custom-built black monster gaming machines to sleek, silver towers of MacPros; from HP pocketPCs and Palm Pilots to iPhones….” Everywhere Kiley looks, he says, “It’s all Mac, all the time.”

“Today the landscape and general use of computers on college campuses is wildly different,” he writes. “Web 2.0 and the affordability of digital-content-producing devices has completely opened up the digital arena for the average college student. Suddenly we can ask for a digital SLR for Christmas and take stunning pictures, and we can immediately share them with all of our friends on Facebook. We can shoot a video of ourselves dancing with our 8 megapixel point-and-shoot cameras, upload it to YouTube, and become overnight internet stars. We can take notes on a GoogleDoc and have five of our classmates editing the document at the same time, in real time. We can travel to Italy to study abroad and video conference with all of our friends, and Skype with our parents. In a time like this, in which computers and web apps are starting to become a major part of interacting with the real world, why would any student want to own a big, bulky computer that can’t handle the heat?”

Macs are easy to use, powerful and extremely capable machines. Students today want to produce content that looks professional, and with Macs and iLife that is absolutely within reach. “We want to make professional quality short films, do graphic design for magazines to make money on the side, and build websites for our parents. When we realized that we have access to the same tools the pros use, we grabbed the bull by the horns and haven’t stopped since.”

Sitting in class now, Kiley no longer sees students on AIM. “I’m watching them create digital art and edit their latest documentary, I’m watching them switch between 8 or 9 tabs…flying from web app to web app. The modern day college kid is making the content that his buddies are watching, reading, sharing, and using. The day PCs catch up to the capabilities and ease-of-use that Macs have, then we’ll see some diversity in the classroom laptop of choice. But for now, Mac has the power.”

On the day that he posted this blog, Kiley was also managing a bunch of UGA websites. He was heading out to film a local band with a Sony camcorder, then upload and edit their latest music video in Final Cut. Later he was going to be mixing some songs in Garageband for an upcoming event. The parents among us might wonder: was any of that activity college-related? The answer is: maybe, maybe not. But the reality is that the facility with which today’s college student dives into high-quality digital creativity will absolutely impact on the quality of work being completed for their educational activities. Macs are at the heart of all that, offering students an ever-widening range of opportunities to express themselves, and to embrace the excitement of learning.