By Michael Pankonien
Staff Writer
The Sidekick staff was recently rewarded with over a dozen new Apple Mac Pro computers this week, replacing the staffs older Dell PCs. The Macs themselves are powered by two 2.4 GHz quad-core processors (giving the macs a total of eight cores), 6Gbs of DDR3 RAM, 1TB hard drives, and ATI Radeon HD 5770 GPUs with 1GB GDDR5. For those of you who don’t speak computer lingo, these computers are powerful.
However the computers do have a massive drawback: retail price on Apple’s website for a Mac Pro is $3,499. And while the computers are all they live up to be and more, one must wonder if a student using Microsoft Word Processor really needs a computer that costs so much money (to be fair, the editors who design pages for the actual Sidekick use a program called Adobe InDesign which is fairly intensive).
The Mac Pro’s themselves are by no means unappreciated by the staff (I couldn’t leave my seat all day the first day they arrived)and the generosity showed by the district has been more than appreciated. But with the massive build up of tech all around the school, one must be wondering if those spending the money understand exactly what they’re spending it on.
Still not sure what I’m talking about? Here’s a link to the computers themselves.
