>"One measure of the suite's success is journalism school."
Journalism and other departments within US universities push Apple products because of the high profits those schools earn on Macs and iPods sold through on campus bookstores to incoming freshman using their student (and parental) loans.
Not sure why the gp got down voted, I think his point is valid, albeit wrong. Student bookstores sell computers, hardware and software at a student discount - my uni sold macbooks at a $100 discount from retail price. This stuff is sold (or sometimes even given away) for the purpose of locking students into a platform.
For example, my uni gave away ms software, like visual studio, to try to encourage adoption, train the students to use ms tools (so when they graduate, they are more likely to find a job using ms tools), and to thereby lock us into their platform. It used to be Sun, then MS. Apple is now doing it, and whoever comes after Apple will do it...
I think pretty much every company on the planet has student discounts. It’s nothing special, it’s nothing specific about Apple. (And it makes, economically speaking, a lot of sense: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination)
For on campus bookstores, computer sales to students correlate to x computers per student not y dollars of total sales. Thus even after discounts, the higher price of Apple products means a greater revenue for the bookstore than Windows or Linux based machines (and greater net earnings assuming constant margins).
The amount a student is able to borrow depends on the costs calculated by the University. Therefore, the higher cost of Macs can be built in to the student's loan package - with the university receiving a portion of that additional money back with fewer restrictions on how it is spent (unlike tuition and fees). That is particularly attractive to public universities.
In smaller college towns, the University may be the only bookstore which sells Macs due to the difficulty an independent bookstore has in qualifying as a Mac dealer as Apple has shifted its retail strategy over the past few years. This again gives the university a financial incentive to require Macs and other Apple products.
Journalism and other departments within US universities push Apple products because of the high profits those schools earn on Macs and iPods sold through on campus bookstores to incoming freshman using their student (and parental) loans.