The Slow Creep of the Mac

There has been a watershed event in the world of the Macintosh, my mother is now the proud owner of a new MacBook. She had no prior Mac experience though she did have an Apple II in her classroom during the '80s, but I'm pretty sure I used it more than she did.

The kicker is she absolutely loves it.  The day after she bought it she had left it at my place for fear that it might be stolen while she was out shopping, and that night my sister Cassie came to get it back for her because she wouldn't leave Cassie's MacBook alone.  She's been using IM regularly as well as video-chatting with her grandkids.

I'm very surprised by the number of switchers since I entered the Mac world back in 2005, it seems most of my family has followed me since then, though I don't know exactly how much I influenced them.  My brother Kyle actually beat me to switching by almost a year.

Becky became a switcher just because she received my old Powerbook as a hand-me-down, but she has admitted to liking it better than Windows, which is significant because she is usually very skeptical of any new technology I try to impose on her.  She gave Linux a chance back in 2001 when I tried to use it as the primary OS on our home computer, but quickly became frustrated and we had a rebooting war for a while before I finally gave in and left Windows up full time.

I have nothing against Microsoft (especially since a collapse in its stock price would probably drag my property value down with it).  In fact, I really like a number of their products like Exchange, Visual Studio (to an extent), and the C# programming language, but after spending time using OS X, Windows really loses its luster. I still haven't spent much time with Vista though what I've read doesn't lead me to believe that it would do much to change my mind.