I have kept my parents and brother's family on macs for years. I live several states away and while I do get calls, they are higher level application usage questions rather than fix the plumbing types of problems. My wife moved over from a Dell to a Macbook a few years ago for similar reasons. I just loaded Firefox, Thunderbird and Office on her Mac and she was right at home. It really has worked well and with used hardware the cost for my sanity has been relatively cheap. The macs are like toasters and telephones; in general they just work.

My VOIP service has an automatic rollover to my cell if for some reason they lose contact with the box in my basement. Before I got a UPS this was handy for power outages. Of course that also meant I got voice spam coming to my cell for that time period. I could also leave it to just rollover to voicecmail which then gets sent to my email as a wav, so I'd still get inbound calls. I could also, via the web interface, forward the number to anywhere else. Sounds like his VOIP service was not very robust. There's a lot more than just being able to make a call over your internet connection.

One time I had to make a personal long distance call while at work and had forgotten my cell. So I went on the web, forwarded my home voip number to the long distance number I wanted to reach. Then I called my house from work which rolled over to the out-of-state business I was trying to call. When the call was over I just turned forwarding back off. Nice.

Under the hood all this does is shift traffic from the dedicated routes from one handset to another to the packet switched data networks that handle voip and other internet traffic. The big telcos still charge a pretty penny for the OC-192 connections that make it all go. The difference is that before they would have to dedicate a T1 of capacity for every 24 lines of communication. Now we can multiplex lots more "channels" per gigabit. So for every 1000 canceled phone lines there is another order for x more digital capacity, but x is much smaller than the capacity canceled. So we should eventually have capacity freed up in the system because of the switch away from dedicated lines, if it weren't for that pesky non-voip internet traffic filling up all the pipes.

As for me and my VOIP I'm loving it. My paid for service has all the features I want (Voicemails sent to my email, blocking anonymous users, call forwarding all configurable from anywhere on the web etc) and is costing me half what Verizon used to charge for a 'real' line. Plus I can take the voip box anywhere and get/make calls. On a trip to Singapore my wife could call her sister in the states the same as from home. Nice.

Just because it was on the Mac doesn't mean it wasn't a great series of games.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_Trilogy
Lots of innovations made there by the Bungie folks before they were bought up my Microsoft and ported Halo from the Mac to XBox.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bungie_Software
Halo was introduced at MacWorld expo in 1999
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eZ2yvWl9nQ

It is unfortunate that the authors chose to ignore Apple's work in this space with their excellent VoiceOver (VO) accessible technology which gives full access to the OS and applications. Because it's built in to every OSX 10.4 and 10.5 machine a blind user can set up everything themselves without sighted assistance. This also makes it a screen reader with the largest installed base; more than Jaws or WindowEyes. In a classroom setting there is no longer the need for the "special" machine for the "special" student, enabling a more mainstream approach. The on-screen feedback also lets sighted and blind users collaborate more easily because the visual user can see what the blind user is doing via the keyboard. Got a USB braille device? Just plug it in without having to install drivers. Got a lot of VO preference settings? Save a profile to a thumb drive and then instantly activate those settings on another machine by just plugging it in.

As mentioned in the article, accessibility technologies such as screen readers are not cheap. Getting a Mac with VO can easily offset the supposed premium price of this hardware. Alex, the VO speech synth is really one of the nicest sounding ones out there with simulated breathing and clear annunciation. Anyone can give it a try by hitting Apple-F5 on a current OSX machine.

I guess OSX is not a major OS or VO is just rudimentary, or the writer is just wrong.

There was a nice rebuttal on Lioncourt.com

Apple's innovations are not constrained to the iPhone/iPod/MacBook/OS realms. Sure it has it's quirks and glitches, but to not even get a mention is a serious error of omission.