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Don't buy a Mac

A month or so back one of my computerless neighbors told me that he and his wife were ready to join the Internet Age and asked if I'd be willing to give him some advice. Of course I said yes, and told him to call me as he got closer to actual purchase.

I saw him a few times after that, and about a week ago he said he was "real close". I chatted with him a few minutes about Macs and PC's, strongly recommending the Mac, and especially made a point to tell him about PC Magaine choosing Mac OS X as the best consumer OS.

On the flip side, I also know that his son works somewhere in the computer field, so I said that if his son would be helping him regularly with problems, he should ask which platform he'd prefer.. that makes obvious sense, I think.

Two days later I ran into him again and he said "We bought a computer. Windows". I assumed he had talked to his son and decided on that basis, but no, his wife "had used Windows at work" so they went with that. I didn't have the heart to tell him that she had probably used XP at work and that Vista wasn't going to be anything like what she was used to, but I did ask where he had bought it. "Best Buy, twelve hundred bucks".

I probably should have kept my mouth shut, but I couldn't help reacting. This guy just needs email and Internet: he doesn't need an expensive computer. I blurted out "Oh, gee, you paid too much!"

"That included a printer", he retorted. Again I should have just shut up, but I like these people and I hate seeing them get taken. "A printer is about seventy bucks", I said.

"And they are coming out to the house to set it up!" he exclaimed.

Great. There's probably two hundred of it, and totally wasted. "Aren't you getting Verizon FIOS?", I asked, knowing the answer already. He affirmed that. "Well, you need the computer set up with FIOS, but there's really nothing to it - and Verizon will do it anyway."

He stared at me for a few seconds. "Well, too late now.". This time I did shut my mouth. Of course it's not too late: he could take that right back to Best Buy and get all his money back. He could spend far less and get a perfectly good system, Apple or Windows, and he sure as heck doesn't need to pay them to "set it up".

Oh well.. I tried. But I do have to wonder: why did he even bother to ask me?

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Mon Mar 17 10:29:29 2008:   anonymous


"But I do have to wonder: why did he even bother to ask me?"

Indeed. It's like asking a doctor for advice and then taking some drug at random he *didn't* advise you to take just because you've seen it before in a medicine-cabinet somewhere previously.

I only hope he doesn't get too much pre-installed "crapware" on there.

Did you tell him he didn't need the expense of subscribing to whatever resource-hogging over-priced security suite shipped as trial offer on there, but that he could uninstall it and, as a home user, put Grisoft AVG on there free? But perhaps you'd think it best not to get into all the pain of trying to mitigate his self-inflicted wounds.

Recently -- at the usually pro-Microsoft CNet of all places -- a columnist reported trying out Ubuntu Linux. One way in which he tested it was seeing if his hairdresser and his aged grandmother could use it, never having seen it before. They could.

One understands that some people have very specific needs to use particular software packages and simply must stick with Windows. But the majority of home users will be so much better off and so much happier on Mac OS X. And now even newbie-friendly distros, like Ubuntu, while not as slick as the Mac, are becoming an attractive alternative to Windows. One wonders how much this guy could have got a machine with pre-installed Ubuntu from Dell for -- less than he paid, obviously.

And heaven help him if he gets problems down the line. Does he realize his machine won't come with an OS disc as an "anti-piracy" measure? (AFAICT, virtually all machines distributed by the major OEMs to home users don't these days.) He'll either have to re-install off a hidden partition or pay through the nose again to get someone else to come in and do it. (And at that point even if he had removed all the aforementioned "crapware" previously, he'll get it all back again.)

But I'll bet even that technologically innocent grandmother could pop a Leopard DVD or a Ubuntu CD in a machine, answer half-a-dozen simple prompts, and have a clean install booting in twenty minutes or so.

I'm convinced that sales of Windows machines stay at the levels they do because of the lack of knowledge of the public. They simply don't know what the alternatives are and how they compare.



Mon Mar 17 10:43:20 2008:   TonyLawrence


I'm sure you are right, but I bet the salesperson at Best Buy "helped" that decision also..



Mon Mar 17 15:29:12 2008:   RichardChapman


We know two things from this: What your neighbor's first computer is and what his second computer will not be.



Mon Mar 17 16:24:52 2008:   TonyLawrence


Wish that were always true.. unfortunately most people go on repeating their mistake.. I can't even get my wife to give up her Windows PC: she knows it's awful, but she's "used to it"..

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