To undertand the significance of this post, you have to understand my parents. Dad has been using Windows for quite some time, and getting him to move from DOS to Windows to NT to XP has been a painful, painful, painful journey. For whatever reason, Windows could never survive under his watch — the machine would slow to a crawl, mysterious things would happen, meanwhile virus checks and spyware would show the system clean. Mom, meanwhile, had no interest in computers and would call me up to look up something for her and read it to her; attempts to put her in front of a machine didn’t go well at all.
A few days ago, dad announced he was done with Windows. He wanted a Mac, and so we sat down together and figured out what he needed and ordered him a nice mid-range Macbook Pro. The instructions, I thought, were fairly simple: when it arrives, don’t do anything with it until we get together and I can show you around.
Well, I’m writing this post because that didn’t happen. And the story doesn’t go in the direction you think it might. Without assistance, not so much as a call to me, he fires up the Mac and configures the operating system, without incident. Though he reports he “lost his Mac” — and where I took this to be some code that something went wrong, it turned out it was code that something went terribly right.
He showed my mother the laptop. Remember, she can’t use Windows to save her life. She’s near retirement age, which provides more context, and goes to bed around 7pm. Apparently she stayed up until 2am playing with it and surfing the web… something she’s never been able to do before.
In my mind, that says a lot. It says that Apple’s got it right. That a complete computerphobe can acclimate to be functional in less than an evening, and enjoy it.
Back to dad: clearly someone who’s never used a Mac before is going to encounter problems and confusion, especially if they have precanned expectations that things ought to work like Windows. My intent is to catalog his issues, and the solutions, so that others making the switch will have some help from someone who’s been in the same shoes.
Look for a link here in coming days.