This morning my sister, the worst of techno-phobes, called. She wanted to
buy her son a new laptop for college and didn’t know what to get.
Well, that’s easy, I said. Get him a new Mac iBook.
But those are too expensive, she said. She wanted to spend, like, $700.
I, too, fell for that trap once. Let my son pick out his own, bottom-line XP
from Dell for about $800. But then I had to load it with so much security
and anti-spyware software, that the XP was hardly a deal anymore. Not to
mention cost for repair after some particularly nasty spyware rendered the
machine inoperable, and its annoyingly slow operating speed because it can’t
handle all that added software.
Spend the extra $300 and buy your son a 12-inch Mac iBook, I told her. It was
made durable and light, particularly suited for a student backpack. And, to
borrow from one of my blog readers (Go-to-Guy Rob Merrell), using a Mac
would put her son’s computer out of harm’s way.
Merrell’s exact words (which echoed a number of other readers), were:
“I recommend Apple computers running OS X to the people who are not computer literate. That way, they get an easier-to-use operating system and are out of the main line of fire for viruses, worms, and other hacks. And the MAC OS X operating system, while not bulletproof, is far sturdier and more secure than Windows has ever been.”
