@zpaolo-
There were quite a few things that went wrong. Each by itself probably wouldn't have been much of an issue, but with all combined it really made us question the administration's judgement. One of the most easily fixed was that excuse for a mouse and keyboard. Yeah, there's a bit of resentment there.I realize some people prefer the laptop style keyboards, and I'm fine with that. But I know that most people I know would rather have a trusty IBM Model M. As for the mouse, I hope I don't have to explain why that is a problem for modeling.
Anyway, mouse and keyboard were easy to fix - I just had to bring my own to the labs. Then there was how IT has bootcamp set up. The computers were always left on, and would reboot automatically every night. So this mean having to shut down OSX, and then boot up windows every day just to use our software. Again, by itself, just annoying.
Then there was the performance issue. I'm not an expert with Macs or bootcamp, but for dual quad core towers costing over $2000 (they splurged), they were really slow. In fact, when in windows mode, the old Lenovos in the Library could outpace them with quick benchmarks like SuperPI. Other performance issues included graphical problems, like having to disable prehighlight due to extreme lag, and some things just not shopwing up right and requiring a reboot. Reboots were required fairly infrequently however.
In addition, Apple support wasn't very helpful with issues like these. I had heard they were pretty good, but I was very disappointed. It seemed like the attitude was "You bought them, you fix them". I imagine others have had better experiences here. There may have been other issues - it wasa year or twoago.
Now when you add this all up, including the price, and think of what kind of PC you could get for 2 grand, it just doesn't make sense. We could have been running towers of equivalent power, and possibly dual 1080p displays per computer. I think that if money is going to be spent, it should be spent on something that is designed for the task at hand.
Also, I don't know about the rest of you, but my computer has firewire, and I've never used it. I'm of the optinion that everything should switch to USB for interconnectivity. But that, and the horrible design of USB ports, is another discussion entirely. Cheers!