Re:Get a mac (Score 1)

Mod this one up. Seriously. I'm the de-facto tech support guy for my entire extended family. I've convinced nearly all of my family to upgrade to the Mac, and my tech support calls have gone from several calls per week to one call per month or less. Any problems which have cropped up have been easy to address. I went so far as to buy a mac mini for a particularly troublesome cousin, and it was money well spent - she upgraded to a macbook pro recently (and on her own dime this time).

The "but macs are so much more expensive than PCs" argument doesn't hold water - a couple of trips to the local PC repair shop to "tune up" windows renders this particular point mute. I've always insisted on quality components in my PCs, so in my case the initial out-the-door price is really not that huge. I was lured into the world of Mac when the Mac Pro was initially released in 2006 - I was in the market for a serious server-class machine and bought the machine with the intention of replacing MacOS with Linux. Used it for a couple of weeks as-is and have never looked back.

I briefly experimented with Ubuntu on family machines - it was fairly well-received and *generally* solved people's problems, but the lack of Microsoft Office was a show-stopper for several family members. Like it or not, Linux is still a solution for geeks, by geeks, and inconsistencies abound.

Windows is still a colossal pile of suck. Even with all patches applied and kept up to date, training users to modify their behavior (using webmail, not clicking on binaries, disabling passwordless admin access, etc), the OS *still* grinds to a halt after 6 months or so. I have not found this to be the case with the Mac.