Better Living Through Thinking

Why Buy an Apple Macintosh?

Fri, 16 Dec 2005

Someone asked me recently if they should get a Mac for their next computer. I practically choked evangelizing my pro-mac views (I'm a recent convert to the Church of Mac: August 2004).

I think the next time I'm asked that, I'll just answer with another question:

Because if you haven't, buying another one won't make life better. Oh it might make things run a bit faster for a while, until Windows decides to implode yet again. Or you get some spyware or a virus (are you calculating the costs of spyware and virus protection?) that wipes your hard drive again.

If you have loved your PC and have loved running Windows, by all means, keep using it.

Otherwise, you might consider some of these things:

• you can open Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, etc. on a Mac
• there is Quicken for Mac
• you can make movies and organize photos better on a Mac (at no additional cost: it's built into the operating system)
• Mac's keep their resale value. Keeping your hardware up-to-date is more expensive than Windows, but you can recover most of your cost on your old hardware, which keeps it on par with Wintel systems cost-wise.
• you won't have to purchase spyware or anti-virus software for Mac (at least not yet). There isn't any of that kind of trash for Mac.
• everything integrates cleanly on Mac.
• You have to try it to understand how much better Mac is. The qualitative difference is almost immediately tangible.