Update: Pictures of Florida School’s “Mac Massacre”

By Nicole Martinelli (6:32 pm, Aug 11 2009)

Trashy? Macs destined for landfill from an elementary school in Florida.

After our post on yesterday’s en masse binning of hundreds of working Macs from a “PC only” school district in Florida, a reader who wished to remain anonymous sent us pics of those computers destined by that school for the trash. We also received comment from a school administrator.

First things first: here they are, stacks of laptops and neat rows of Macs destined for the rubbish heap. Our tipster says more than 208 perfectly good Macs are headed for the dump.

As many of you pointed out in the comments of yesterday’s piece, even if the school district didn’t want to use the Macs, they could’ve sold them and used the money — or given them away instead of just dumping them.

More pics of the great Florida Mac massacre & commentary after the jump.

macs1

A CoM reader and Sarasota resident was so outraged by the situation to ping a Florida administrator for clarification. We are re-publishing those comments here, with the caveat that we haven’t been able to verify them in the meantime:

Q: NyxoLyno Cangemi

As a Sarasota resident, I can’t help but ask why my tax dollars are
being misused like this? You are sending working Apple computers to the scrap heap?

A:
Lori M. White
Superintendent of Schools
The School Board of Sarasota County, Florida

“It is unfortunate that there was some mis-information in this news story. These computers that were between five and ten years old will be assessed by our tech staff to determine which machines can be refurbished and given to families. This program operates through donated goods and services. Those machines that cannot be refurbished will be removed by a state-approved recycling company for disposal. We receive a small check for this service and it eliminates our cost for electronic disposal.
Staff can receive a computer, but the operating system and all software must be removed. Our licensing agreements do not allow us to transfer this on computers to other owners. The benefit of a computer without the operating system is limited and is not very cost effective when considering the cost of installing new software.”

macs2

It’s sad to see so many computers (total count from tipster: 208) that look to be in good condition and were said to be working destined for landfill because of license agreements (open source, anyone?) , despite the official considerations.

Ouch.

Here’s several more pictures of all the machines that are being dumped, sent by our source.

62 comments »

About the author

Nicole Martinelli is a San Francisco native who has lived in Milan and Florence, Italy. She's written for Wired.com, The New York Times and Newsweek. You can find her on Twitter , Facebook and Google+.

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Posted in News | Tagged: apple education |

Ben
Load linux on them and ship them to schools in developing countries…or just sell them on eBay…
Chris
Just to ask, on the 4th picture down, amongst all the eMacs and snow iMacs, is that an iMac G4?
Also, some of those machines MAY be able to run Leopard well. Some of those eMacs if they are above 1Ghz could run Leopard quite happily!
gq330
What a waste. Seriously they should have had a garage sale and put some money to a learning field trip for the kids or some type of equipment for the schools. How about musical instruments? Hell, they could have bought some Windows equipment. The guy who did this is a total idiot. I would want him off my school board next election time.
Yesterday I gave an old Emac g4 to someone that didn’t have a computer. It runs on the net and they have access to something they didn’t have before. It really wasn’t that difficult to do.
BigMac
@ MacMonkey… AMEN. I feel the same way.
cma
It may be a security issue. Here in South Carolina we had a sell of computers from a school that had used them for years and were replacing them. Someone that just wanted some computers bought some and they ended up having private teacher and student information on them because they were all on the same server so any teacher could access any computer in school and use it as an admistrator. Even though it was an error the school had to pay the person to buy the computers back, the person didn’t give them back without the cash. So I think its a good idea to recycle as much as you can because they don’t know who put what information on those computers and believe it or not the kids get around the ware that protects the computers and I wouldn’t want to have a computer that had porn on it and have my children see it.
Scabby
BUT…once they’re in the trash the school corporation doesn’t have a say on them. The Supreme Court ruled that your trash is fair game. If you throw it away, anyone can have it.
annoyedatstupidity
Another example of PeeCee users that know nothing about computers. This guy should loose his job. Sure some o the really old imacs are not very useful but the emacs and the laptops are. They should be sold off.
PC-only is trouble.
This guy is not very bright.
A school Tech
The computers and laptops may be a little old, but they can still make good classroom computers for the student for research, book reports, class projects and after school programs. The students can play games when they are in free time. All I am tring to say is that schools board members have loss there jobs. Schools do not have the money to by paper to print or paper to dry our hands, the computer and laptop can be used for something in that schools.
Keep technology in the schools…..
CentralTech
Working for public schools with little money, I can say its a shame. Most techs know PCs, and remove macs when they can. I learned mac, upgraded the firmware under 9.2 and then installed 10.4.11 after buying Leopard and downgrading on 150 imacs. It only required more memory. Upper district tech support staff decides what stays and what goes. They know PCs not Mac. They also know MS, not Linux or any variable. Are districts and states loosing money? Yes! And board members; do they know enough to push for change and risk being the only one to take a stand? No. After years with MS and Apple/Mac, what do I prefer? Linux. I loved Yellowdog on macs and Ubuntu on PCs. Do I have a choice? Not at work.
RMabra
What a shame, there are plenty of students who don’t have a computer at home that could of benefited from this districts poor thought process. The laptops look like G4′s that run great. What a waste of money and a poor decision.
eric
I would personally buy some of the laptops, as I KNOW they are slow, but still good technology for the basics. So what if they can’t run Leopard? I don’t care! I know 10.3 and 10.4 Tiger will work just fine! I already have a brand new mac that has Leopard, and a 1999 CRT imac that runs Tiger without any problems!!
I wonder if there is a payoff to Microsoft somewhere in this hidden deal to go PC only. Hmmm. The lucrative contracts Msoft gets from supplying all this.
It is tragic to see such waste of good Apple technology, even if it is obsolete!
I personally fix both Macs and PCs all the time for people. So I know how to upgrade older computers!
Believe it or not.. my 3 ancient macs (era 1999) are STILL working ok, and work fine for the projects I need. My 10 year old windows XP machine has already died and was unable to be resurrected after daily heavy duty computer use.
I agree with many of the above commenters. Many of the computers can be refurbished and given to charity, sold on ebay, amazon, given to goodwill for repairs, and the ones that are completely dead, recycle for gold and silver.
The imacs may be very old, but I just happen to have a 1999 CRT imac that chugs along and still works ok. It was my first mac that convinced me to leave windows behind for good.
Especially after my frustrating nightmares with XP and Vista WGA (windows genuine advantage problems – with LEGAL store bought windows software), activation problems, viruses, trojans, spyware, popup ads….. Annoying incompatibility problems with MICROSOFT Vista certified hardware that would NOT work with Microsoft Vista!! Too many headaches with windows. I waste more time fixing my windows machines than I ever do on a Mac. With a Mac, I can get MORE work done, without wasting valuable time fixing them all the time. Only with windows pcs do I end up wasting time repairing them, rather than using them. Vista was the most frustrating of all the versions, and after spending many hours fixing all my friends Vista computers, I had enough of the constant problems!
That was the last straw that broke my ties with Microsoft after 20 years as a windows user!
The price of windows keeps going up, and the glitches was getting worse with each version! Millenium Edition was a total disaster…. which I wiped out and replaced on a laptop with Linux… as ME kept crashing too many times!
Vista has become a VERY unpopular version of windows with all my friends / family who bought new Vista machines. They now hate Vista. 3 of my Vista friends are now thinking of switching to Apple after all the problems they had with Vista!
So good luck school staff…. you’re going to be screaming later when you see the cost overruns of IT techs working overtime to fix virus problems, trojans, spyware gloats, crashes, corrupt registries, Vista’s slowness, incompatibility issues, and “cancel or Allow” nag screens every time you install an update.
The students will miss the macs, and will be frustrated with Vista’s problems. The school will wish they stayed with Apple and saved money instead of losing money with Microsoft.
E
Coda
That School is located in north port, fl and its name is toledo blade elementary i know this due to the fact that i went there and can point out in every picture the details about this school