03-24-2006, 05:12 AM
My mom was a Mac user, way back in the day. She switched over to Windows for her home computing needs maybe 10 years ago when her company went Windows-only and her partner bought a PC for the home. She was content to use his stupid Gateway all-in-one-pathetic-iMac-clone for a long time, but tired of dealing with her many digital photos under Windows -- Photoshop Elements and Picasa didn't get it done for her.
I showed her iPhoto a little while ago and it planted a seed somewhere. A couple of months ago, she went to an Apple store and checked out iPhoto in a little more in-depth manner and was summarily blown over. She called me right away and asked me to get her an inexpensive machine, preferably a laptop. So I sprung for a refurb iBook G4/12"/1.33GHz/512MB/40GB/Combo for $800. It arrived today, and the bundle on this particular refurb was a bit different than the usual refurb fare: some of the cables and adapters were thrown loosely in the box, and the Tiger/iBook manuals were photocopied onto 8.5x11" paper and stapled together. Weeeeird! At least they didn't forget the iLife 06 drop-in DVD.
Despite the weirdness in the packing, the iBook was just fine hardware-wise. Did a clean load of the OS from my up-to-date Tiger clone, installed iLife 06, installed a spare 512MB PC2700 SODIMM, tested OK with Apple Hardware Test. Now I get to take the thing down to my mom's house on Sunday, load her data on it from the PC, and show her the finer points of Mac OS X. And I'll have to buy her a book, probably something pretty basic. Anyone try "Switching To The Mac: The Missing Manual" by Pogue, et al.?
I showed her iPhoto a little while ago and it planted a seed somewhere. A couple of months ago, she went to an Apple store and checked out iPhoto in a little more in-depth manner and was summarily blown over. She called me right away and asked me to get her an inexpensive machine, preferably a laptop. So I sprung for a refurb iBook G4/12"/1.33GHz/512MB/40GB/Combo for $800. It arrived today, and the bundle on this particular refurb was a bit different than the usual refurb fare: some of the cables and adapters were thrown loosely in the box, and the Tiger/iBook manuals were photocopied onto 8.5x11" paper and stapled together. Weeeeird! At least they didn't forget the iLife 06 drop-in DVD.
Despite the weirdness in the packing, the iBook was just fine hardware-wise. Did a clean load of the OS from my up-to-date Tiger clone, installed iLife 06, installed a spare 512MB PC2700 SODIMM, tested OK with Apple Hardware Test. Now I get to take the thing down to my mom's house on Sunday, load her data on it from the PC, and show her the finer points of Mac OS X. And I'll have to buy her a book, probably something pretty basic. Anyone try "Switching To The Mac: The Missing Manual" by Pogue, et al.?