If Steve Jobs (
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Alert) – out on medical leave until June – is still running
Apple Inc. as insiders
say he is, then the iconic CEO appears to have a soft spot for education.
Macworld.com’s Jonathan Seff is
reporting today that the Cupertino, California-based company is planning to sell its 20-inch iMac model (pictured below, courtesy of Apple (
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Alert)) to educational institutions for an exclusive price of $899 – $250 less than its regular price for students and $300 less than non-students pay for it.
“The model is only available to educational institutions, not for individual students or faculty,” Seff reports.
It’ll be available in about a month, giving schools some lead time to write bulk purchases into their fiscal year 2010 budgets.
The news about Apple comes as Jobs passes the halfway point of his medical leave.
As TMCnet
reported this week, about three months after
citing a hormone imbalance as the cause of his striking weight loss, Jobs is said to be heavily involved in running key parts of his company.
According to
this article by Yukari Iwatani Kane of the Wall Street Journal, Jobs – who has had pancreatic cancer – continues to work on the iPhone (
News -
Alert) maker’s strategies and products from his home. Jobs has been on medical leave since January and plans to return to Apple full-time in June.
Citing unnamed sources, Kane says that the 54-year-old reviews products and product plans, and was closely involved in the user interface of the new iPhone OS that Apple
unveiled last month.
“Apple co-founder Mr. Jobs, who is considered the company’s creative leader, is also involved in the development of future projects, (people familiar with the matter) say,” Kane reports. “People privy to the company’s strategy say Apple is working on new iPhone models and a portable device that is smaller than its current laptop computers but bigger than the iPhone or iPod Touch.”
Jobs’ health is a topic that the industry icon is compelled to address, not just because he’s a high-profile figure in business and technology, but also because Apple’s stock drops with each whisper of his imminent death (as TMCnet
reported, Jobs tried to make light of the rumors while unveiling new iPods at an event in September).
Regardless of Jobs’ health, the offer from Apple is expected to aid schools and universities navigating this down economy.
The iMac includes the same 1,066MHz system bus as consumer models, 1GB of DDR3 RAM, a 160GB SATA hard drive, 802.11n wireless networking, a gigabit Ethernet port, four USB 2.0 ports, one FireWire 800 port, a slot-loading SuperDrive, and Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics processing.
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Michael Dinan is a contributing editor for TMCnet, covering news in the IP communications, call center and customer relationship management industries. To read more of Michael's articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by
Michael Dinan
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