Buying Apple Products For A College, Dilemma for end user Options

[midiwife]

I wonder if anyone else is experiencing the poblems I face...

I ordered 7 Dual processor 2.7GHz machines at the beginning of July aiming to have them all set up with new software installed and ready to run a whole range of music tech courses beginning on September 19th. I don't think this is an unreasonable plan.

I'm still waiting for the macs and have had to postpone the start of all of our courses (Logic, Cubase, Reason, Live, Sibelius and ProTools).

I also ordered a 10 user educational package of Logic Pro on June 24th and only yesterday, September 20th, I received one media set. I received the dongles several weeks ago.

I also ordered a wide variety of other software updates all of which beat these orders even if they were placed much later.

I am a long time mac user and fan but in terms of running a department, I now feel that Apple have let me down badly. The Macs are on order from an Apple reseller but they have told us that there is a severe problem in fulfilling orders for the top spec 2.7 machines. The problem seems to be coming from Apple US who are failing to supply these orders.

Apparently, the Logic delivery problem was due to the fact that Apple have changed the way they package and sell multi user licences for education.

It seems to me that Apple are advertising products that they seem unable or unwilling to supply in a reasonable period of time.

I would be keen to hear from anyone else who has had problems with orders for this machine or any other Apple products when ordering for education as I don't think I can be the only one facing tough choices for the future.

[midiwife]

Cheers Dixiechicken,

The information you state about Sweden makes very interesting reading.

In fact we did lose out, mostly in terms of additional administration burden to contact all our incoming students, ammend tutor contracts etc. The actual funding will remain the same I'm guessing but it's been a real headache for our whole department.

Although we have the machines now, they were ordered with additional internal HDs and additional RAM chips.

I work part time, and because of the real rush to get the machines ready for teaching, I wanted to fit these myself as we'd had them delivered previous to the macs themselves. A representative from the reseller told me that if I did so, I would void my warranty. I'm quite sure that this is not true, I've never heard this to be the case.

So the nightmare continues and I've taken a day off to cool down...

Kind regards to you,

Karina Townsend.