My youngest sister recently moved to a high school where every student is given and expected to use a MacBook. In passing, it sounded like a great idea. One imagines a classroom utopia populated with smiling, enthusiastic students touting their shiny, new MacBooks. A perfect stock photograph.

A decision would have been made by the school that Macs would be a tremendous learning aid in the classroom. And it was not a decision without merit. Several possible reasons as to why the school went with a Mac over a PC alternative come to mind:

• Build quality and durability
• Lifetime run cost
• Better supplier partnership.

Notwithstanding these and other reasons, however, let’s pause for a second here. What is the ultimate goal of any school?

At its crudest form, the school system is designed to produce excellent workers. Graduates are to be equipped with the skills and knowledge such that they are best able to contribute to society in a meaningful way.

Being lucky enough to live in a developed country, it is likely that graduates of the school will eventually end up working in a job in the tertiary industry, or some other white collar profession in the primary or secondary industries. It is more than likely that any job will involve some interaction with a computer. And it is almost certain that that computer will not be a Mac.

The number one reason why MacBooks are a poor choice for students, stares me in the face for 7.5 hours every working day. What kind of computer do I use at work? Windows. What kind of computers do my clients use, whether they be oil or gas giants, government departments or smaller family run businesses? Windows.

I work as an IT Auditor for a Big4 accounting firm. As a result, I’ve looked into the systems of countless companies across just about every sector possible. And how many Macs have I come across? Zero. Macs, and the operating system that runs on them, OS X, are simply not widely used in the business world. Whether it was a case of Windows being better suited to enterprise needs, or having become ingrained in the business culture first, it doesn’t matter. Windows computers are the computers of choice in almost any organisation that you will work in.

Let’s take a step back and look at this from the students’ perspective.

For many students at their age, this will be the first time that they will be using a computer to actually do some proper work. Sure, they may have interacted with their home computer, tablet, smartphone or other device beforehand, but not for anything productive. When using their MacBook at school they will learn how to do all the simple, little activities that anyone who works in a white collar job has to do on a daily basis. Learning how to save files on the proper document server, printing and scanning documents, answering and managing emails, backing up their work properly, et cetera. And they will be learning how to do all of these activities, on a MacBook, in the fashion that works for Macs, which are slightly different to Windows PCs.

Habits learned when you are younger are far harder to alter years later. Why put those students who may already struggle with technology at a disadvantage when they are later forced to change their habits?

This problem is further compounded when we take a step deeper, and look at the applications that run on Mac OSX in comparison to Windows. The most commonly used applications in the business world are something that we are all very familiar with, Microsoft Office. Good old Outlook, Word, Powerpoint and Excel. But no problem, says the school, Macs have been able to run their own special version of Office for Mac since 1984.

That’s all fine and well, but have you ever tried using Office for Mac? It’s different. It’s not the same. The functionality is mostly there, but the way you interact with it and get it to perform what you want is different. And when you need to produce that slick, professional looking report for your client, with all the fancy charts and numbers to back it up, you need to do so in the quickest and most efficient way possible. And if you’ve grown up using Mac for Office, you’re going to struggle to do so on the Windows version.

On another note, the closed, controlled nature of Apple’s products is a double edged sword when choosing a Mac for education. Apple will present a beautiful case to the school’s board on the wonderful support and warranty it provides for all its products. And in this case, I will agree, Apple support beats the support offered by any of the other big PC manufacturers quite easily. It’s one of the benefits that comes when you control the entire supply chain, from manufacturing, to software development, to retail. Yet this closed nature locks you in to doing everything Apple’s way.

This was highlighted to me very personally in a recent incident.

My sister wanted to backup her work on a portable harddrive. The tech team at the school hadn’t gotten around to showing her class how to use Apple’s wonderful ‘Time Machine’ backup software. She came and asked me how to do it, and I figured, how hard can it be to backup a file to a USB? Yet apparently it wasn’t so simple. Her school’s group settings did not allow you to simply copy your files onto a portable harddrive, you had to back it up using Time Machine. I didn’t have the time to look into setting up Time Machine that night, so we left it.

A couple of days later, her machine died.

She hadn’t backed the files up yet as the tech team at school still hadn’t come round to show them how to use Time Machine. Needless to say, she lost all her work.