Web Design and Web Development Help

Why I Told My Sister to Buy a Mac

In my circle of friends, I am well-known as a computer geek. As a geek, people are drawn to me with all their mundane computer questions. I get calls all the time from people asking me how to speed up their system or what to do when their hard drive crashes. I tell them I am really a web designer and not a computer technician. I even have a T-shirt that says, “NO, I will NOT fix your computer!” But, I still have six computers in my office now, each in various stages of disrepair. Not long ago my sister called to get my help with a new computer purchase. Having recently bought a MacBook Pro, I tried to get her to convert as well. Here are a few reasons why I think Mac is a great choice for the average user, and an even better choice for the design professional.

First of all, and very important to my non-geek sister, Macs come pretty much loaded out with what you need. There are less decisions to be made about RAM and ROM and those other troubling issues that confound a PC user. Sis pretty much just plays games on her system. She wanted a computer that would run her games faster than her old PC. Right there is one problem with PCs. A computer novice tends to think if it is “new” that it will be faster. That is not necessarily true. On Black Friday my sister got up at 3:00am and raced to Best Buy to grab their advertised package. For $399.00 she would have a “new” system. It was a real let down when I pointed out to her that the new system was not really that much more powerful than her old system. Yes, it had 2 gigs of RAM and a 320 GB hard drive. But the processor speed was way low and the graphics card was totally inadequate to run the games she wanted to buy. With a Mac, there aren’t any tricks like this. The stats are clearly listed on a Mac and they come with a minimum level of sufficiency. If I send her to buy a MacBook, the lowest processor she could get would be a 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. That would be quite sufficient for her needs. And the fact is, because the Mac OS is specifically built to handle the hardware that is installed, it is much more efficient and faster. Apple doesn’t license out its OS to various manufacturers. For example, Microsoft sells their OS to pretty much any computer company who wants to throw one together. That computer manufacturer will, in turn, purchase hardware from whatever source and software from another source and put the machine together. That means that the various hardware components will work together, but are not designed to work together efficiently. With a Mac, all the hardware components are engineered to work with the Mac OS. You get a system built by the same people who make the OS, the applications, and the computer itself. This means that everything works together flawlessly and efficiently. Whatever you can do with your 512 MEG graphics card and 4 gigs of RAM, I can do with half the hardware in half the time on my Mac. This is just plain amazing! So, I can trust my innocent sister to Apple and know that she will walk away with a usable system.

Another important thing to an innocent user, is the virus factor. I get lots of calls from people with all sorts of strange things happening to their system. The screen is shaking, or they are locked out of their files, or they’ve got a BSOD. I begged my sister to buy a Mac, because your chances of getting a virus are so much less. There are over 100,000 harmful viruses lurking out in cyberspace. Most of these are designed to infect PCs. Macs are immune to most of them, in large part due to its UNIX based OS. It is much more stable. In order for any software to mess with your system, you have to type in your password. Vista has tried to copy this innate security, but has failed miserably. Again, I have received countless calls from people with compatibility issues after upgrading to Vista. I have pulled my hair out trying to figure out why Vista has suddenly locked my clients out of their files or won’t let them use their routers. It’s like Vista has a mind of its own–and has LOST it! But when I upgraded my Mac to Leopard it was flawless. Again, Apple knew what hardware components were in my system and it just worked. I want my sister to have a system that “just works” because that means I can spend my time doing what I want to do, and not feel obligated to run over to her place to format and restore her system.

And that’s another issue with a PC. Every year or so it is recommended that you format a Windows computer. You can delay this by defragging every so often…but eventually it will get so bogged down that you just have to clean house. Now a lot of novices would just figure they have a virus or something, and go out and buy a new system at this point. You’ve got to wonder if this is really some diabolical Microsoft marketing plan. To avoid buying a new system, many users will haul their system into the shop where the techs there advise a format and restore. It’s truly sad. Bad things happen when I format. It seems I always neglect to back up some little file somewhere and end up losing something that was “irreplaceable.” With a Mac, it defrags “on the go.” You avoid all the hassle associated with defragging or formatting.

The other thing my sister was worried about, was being able to use the software that she already has. By software, Sis means games. She wouldn’t know a word processor if it jumped out and bit her on the …well you get the picture. But she can rest easy knowing that she can, in fact, play all her favorite games. And she has several choices about how she does that. If she wants to use a Windows game and wants all of her system resources dedicated towards that game, she can install “Boot Camp.” This program was created by Apple, and it’s FREE. Basically, it creates another partition on your hard drive, on which Windows is installed. With this program you can shut down your Mac, and select “Windows” as you boot back up. Your Mac comes up and acts just like it’s a PC. It may even run slightly better than most PCs. Then, you can use whatever games or applications that you ran on your old PC.

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