Yeah I think they needed horsepower to run some sophisticated models in Matlab, and Apple had a killer educational discount.

Just seemed odd to pay your way into the Apple ecosystem just to wipe it and install Ubuntu

I remember having my mind blown in college when I saw a Mac Pro tower running Ubuntu in a lab.

Yeah. They cancelled it after they realized that people were buying consoles to build computing structures which went against Sony’s “sell the console at a loss and make it up in game sales” strategy.

Edit: on wait, that was PS3.

What’s funny is that’s how it started. Apple sold movies as early as 2007 before Netflix or Amazon video or whatever and expected you to host the files locally either on your computer or your AppleTV (which had a hard disk drive at the time) and stream it locally over iTunes. If you lost the file, that was supposed to be it.

Of course, you still had to authenticate your files with the DRM service, and eventually they moved libraries online and gave you streaming access to any files you had purchased.