On Jan 29, 2004, at 11:10 AM, Vivien M. wrote:
Then yer mom should get a Mac.
And if she's like my mom, she'll be in the aisle in the computer store (well, the big box electronics store, more realistically) and be like "Why should I pay $2000 for this one when I can get 'a computer' for $500?" [1]
Agreed. That's where you educate your mom on why Macs are godly, PCs running windows are evil and Linux is a little to complex still for the end user, and bluntly doesn't look as pretty out of the box. If she squaks at the price, you tell her that you get what you pay for. How many times has her printer stopped working or she's been unable to download her pics or watch some video or a dvd or something else that XP touts as super easy, and integrated? Actually, since I got my first Mac last year, I've been barking up and down about how amazing it is. I told everyone I sold every PC I ever owned because I could do it all on my powerbook. They are all jealous. I had XP for my email, visio and word, *nix for my geek router & perl stuff, another PC for my audio production stuff. All gone. All I have now is a 17" Powerbook. It's all I'll ever need. Well, no -- it's not. When I need something for music, I'll get a G5. Plain and simple, I will never own a PC again. It's funny, I went out of town for thanksgiving with my family. When we got to where we were going, my mom was complaining that her digital camera flash was full and she didn't have another one. I told her that I could download the pictures to my powerbook and email them to her later. As I was connecting the camera, she asked "Well, don't you need to download and install the softw...." she stopped mid-sentence as the Mac found the PowerShot, opened iphoto and proceeded to download the pictures -- no software needed. She looked Jealous. When the last big MS virus/worm caused it's major shitstorm, my mom asked me if I ever get infected with viruses. I said no, I run a Mac. They are immune to these viruses. She looked jealous. Needless to say, a year after she bought herself her Dell with her 19" flat panel monitor, in a couple months, she'll be picking up her new 20" iMac. Now I'm jealous. I've got a couple other friends who are going to shitcan their PCs in favor of Macs. I agree, price is a big thing and it will continue to be. Until people can convince others to look beyond that, they are all going to be stuck in the MS world, plagued by all this badness wondering "Is there something else better out there?" All this, while us non-MS folks sit back with a big satisfying grin.
You can't expect people's mothers to actually know the differences between the different platforms, just like I'm sure that when most people's mothers shop for cars, they can't tell you the advantage of a particular engine type over another. They just end up picking based on price and "ability to meet need", and for most mothers old-enough-to-have-NANOG-posting-kids out there, your $500 eMachines or whatever is more than enough. Expecting them to spend additional money to address a problem they don't understand is an unrealistic expectation.
Of course you can't expect them to know. That's where we come in; the free and the saved :) It's all about educating the less fortunate :) There is a very fine line between pay now, save later and save now, pay later. The latter almost always works out to cost a hell of a lot more than the former ever would have. (hypothetical) Buy the $12,000.00 (CDN) KIA with no snow tires, no ABS, no nothing. Drive somewhere in a snow storm, get stuck going up a hill, try to back down the hill, get sideswiped by the guy in the Touareg because he can't see your tiny little $12,000.00 KIA soap box, get flung over the guardrail, down the hill and into the valley. Pay the tow truck to come bail your ass out, pay your insurance deductible and the extra rates you are going to ensue because you just wrote off your car. Add all that up and compare that to the price of a brand new Touareg over 10 years. Guess what, your analogy just lost ground :)
Vivien -- Vivien M. vivienm@dyndns.org Assistant System Administrator Dynamic Network Services, Inc. http://www.dyndns.org/