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Pemalite said:

Captain_Yuri said:

Schools have changed. No longer do they build giant computer rooms with hundreds of machines, it's more economical to get students to buy a Netbook/Notebook at the start of the year and take them to each lesson... But even the longevity of those low-end devices are lasting longer as performance is good enough.

The College near me for example... Back in the 90's had 500~ Pentium 2 based system running Windows NT that I setup with it's own dedicated print and file servers... The amount of floor space that took up was massive, the electricity and cooling was also massive... Running Ethernet all through the school... Massive. And back then I fed that cluster with quad load balanced 128kb/s ISDN lines... Not a small cost. But 512kb/s was an insane amount of bandwidth back then.

And every 2-3 years all those machines were sold off and new ones brought in to keep pace with the rapid improvements in technology, we moved to Pentium 3's, then Pentium 4, then Pentium D... And then once the Core 2 came about, it slowed massively... Heck I would argue on a lean machine with a Core 2... You can still do word processing and web browsing just fine. It won't be fun, but it's more than adequate for that task.

Now that college just has wireless access points fed via ethernet and connects to a single server... All that space was reclaimed and is now classrooms, saving money on not needing to expand.

Times have simply changed.

Yeah, unless it's a specific IT class there won't be any computer rooms anymore

However, schools (at least here) tend to buy a new laptop to every student for the education cycle they're in (primary, lower, median, higher), so that's 4 laptops per student when before schools shared the same hardware for many different classes, so all in all there are more processors sold now than back then. As such, I consider Gelsinger's argument with the schools as just a stupid excuse.