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The distribution of Linux boxes in professor's offices has changed; many professors have purchased Linux boxes, but some have replaced their Linux boxes of three years ago with Apples. I can't tell you why; I don't know these professors, and I'm a bit too shy to walk into a professor's office and ask, "Say, I've noticed the old RedHat workstation has been replaced with a PowerMac -- what's up with that?" But there have been a few changes.

My roommate, who works in applied mathematics, decided to buy a G4 iBook, due both to my positive experience with it, and to his own advisor's use of Apple hardware for his research. They run Matlab mostly, occasionally Maple. He has been quite satisfied with the iBook. I found myself occasionally on call to help him get software running on it. The most pernicious problems was getting his wireless ethernet router to communicate with his iBook, but that was due to the router's shoddily-written manual, which gave the wrong name for the wireless network.

The biggest surprise came some weeks ago, when one of my office's biggest Linux advocates showed up with a 12" PowerBook. Peter had just won a research award, and wanted a portable to take his work with him to conferences, or even on the road. He decided to buy a PowerBook. Why? He didn't want to spend two or three weeks researching which laptops were supported by Linux; nor did he want to waste time getting CygWin to work on a Windows box. He simply ordered a PowerBook, got it in the mail, and was using it the following weekend at ECCAD 2004 to give a talk using his TeX-generated slides (works great with Preview -- and probably with Acrobat as well) and to demonstrate the Maple program he wrote to implement his research. He won't shut up about how cool iTunes is.

This caused quite the stir; Peter brought his PowerBook to a party at another colleague's home. The goal was to test whether it worked with the apartment's free wireless internet access. It seems Walker (the colleague hosting the party) has been considering buying an iBook himself, but he wanted to make sure the Airport Extreme card would pick up the apartment's network. It was as easy as opening up the PowerBook: it woke from sleep, detected the network, and popped open a dialog, naming the network and asking if Peter wanted to join it.

The other mathematicians at the party (and two computer scientists as well) were eager to set their eyes on Peter's PowerBook; it made the rounds and won general acclaim. Quite a few expressed favorable opinions, and said they would look into acquiring one. There were the usual comments on its stylish looks and its gorgeous interface, including from Peter -- this from the man who used to mock me for my iBook's "eye candy" :-)

Triumph of triumphs: Peter's advisor -- he of the opinion that we Computer Algebraists should be using Linux instead of a Mac -- was impressed at the conference by Peter's PowerBook, and said he might have to get one.

Apple is making inroads in academia :-) My colleagues are catching up with my wisdom ;-)

But will it mean anything?

I don't know if Apple is aware of the potential market it has in academia. The Virginia Tech supercomputer cluster aside, I haven't seen much of a marketing push at the university level. -- Sure, there's been a general push to attract users of Unix, but as someone who works in academia, I don't feel Apple is making anywhere near the effort to attract me that they could. People like me are precisely whom Apple should be targeting: scientists and mathematicians who use Unix software to solve problems, and who can afford the price premium (real or imagined) necessary to avoid the troubles inherent to Linux or Windows or Sun or... Admittedly, I may not run in the right circles to notice such a push.

Universities have a legacy of using Unix; mathematicians and computer scientists are familiar with it, as are most natural scientists, and most of our software runs already on some flavor of Unix. Porting legacy Unix software to OS X is relatively painless (especially when compared to porting it to Windows); the Fink project has already made much progress in this regard. OS X is much, much easier to use than traditional Unix boxes: all the power, little of the pain. I don't know what the statistics are in terms of installed computers, marketshare, &c.; to tell the truth, I don't care. What I care about, is that I get my work done, using the software I need, in an environment that is user-friendly, and Òjust works.Ó

Okay, so what exactly is your point?

A month or two ago, another OSNews author asked the question, can you get "serious work" done on a Mac? His answer: maybe other people could, but for various reasons, he couldn't. As I recall, his problem was getting his Apple to work in the Windows-dominated environment where he worked; at a low point in the article, he pointed out that Microsoft Office for OS X wouldn't properly read PowerPoint files written by Microsoft Office for Windows.

For obvious reasons, I was genuinely dismayed to read the article. I'm lucky enough to work in an environment where the IT department is half-competent and runs a network that is truly open. All our information is shared on a centralized network that runs on AFS. I hadn't invested huge amounts of my time and data using programs that don't play well with other, like Microsoft Office. It isn't hard to connect my iBook to the network, and the common Unix foundation underlying Linux and OS X make it easy to control Žowyn from Parvula. Getting the two machines to cooperate has been a snap.

Based on my experience: Yes, you can real get work done on a Mac, and a growing number of academics is doing just that. But has Apple noticed, and will they capitalize?

About the author:
Jack Perry is a research assistant at North Carolina State University. For some reason he can't fathom, one of his web pages is (at the time of this writing) the #1 Google hit when searching for S-Polynomial reduction. (Something more useful ought to be #1.) In his spare time, he laments the greater popularity of the curly-brace languages over languages where statements such as

p++ = --q ? c = a(*p, **q) != *b(&p, q) : c = a(*p, **q) == *b(&,q);

1. "Apple in Academia, Page 1/3"
2. "Apple in Academia, Page 2/3"
3. "Apple in Academia, Page 3/3"