It also says that they haven't learned how these monster plastic-cased laptops have a half-life of two years.

Even the one Mac laptop that I saw over two days of advising was a 15" model, and not the new super-thin variant. This trend, assuming I'm looking at a decent random sample, says that Apple is in some trouble with the college crowd. Used to be you'd look up at a college classroom and everybody had a Mac. My sample, at least, says this trend might be turning. I asked one student about it, and it boiled down to price. Sure enough, Dell will sell you a 15" laptop "starting at $399". Apple doesn't go there. Sure, that Dell is slower (Core i3 processor, 4GB of RAM, 500GB hard disk), but it's still perfectly serviceable. They probably didn't buy the extended warranty.

One student was complaining that her Dell kept rebooting all the time "probably from my anti-virus software".

Sigh.