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My long Years As A Mac Evangelist Bring The Big Pay Off This was a good week for me as a Mac evangelist. My eldest sister finally decided to get a new iMac, and some very close friends did the same thing. In both cases, I had been pushing them to get a new Mac for many years. The interesting thing is that in both cases, they almost went to the Dark Side. For the last few years, my older sister has had a Mac that I gave her. It’s a Centris 650, one of the fastest 68040 Macs made. It has a very small hard drive and just enough RAM to get by with. At her office job, she works on a PC and felt great pressure to get a PC for the house. Her children were also pressuring her to get a PC because that's what all their friends had. They wanted to be just like their friends, an understandable emotion for kids to be sure. But they also felt that those PCs were better because they were comparing a 6 year-old Mac to whatever Pentium II monstrosities their friends had and finding the Mac to come up short. It always seemed like the cool games their friends had wouldn't play on their Macs and they couldn't download anything from the Internet due to the small hard drive on the Centris. It was driving me nuts because of the Apples and oranges comparison (sorry, I had to say it). My close friends are a slightly different case. They are a young and recently married couple. I have known them both for many years and during all that time they have been sitting on the fence about buying a computer. It has never been too important to them to own a computer, but recently the "she" portion of this couple needed a computer for her new job. While I have been preaching the virtues of the Mac for as long as I have known them, I was still pleasantly surprised when they called me out of the blue to get computer buying advice. I had feared that the call of the Dark Side would prove too great. It seems they had been to the local Circuit City, home of the infamous eOne from eMachines, looking for a new computer. The PC sales person was kind enough to warn them about the many perils of buying a Mac: The inability to find a place to get it repaired should it break, the added cost of doing so assuming you can actually find a repair place, and the dreaded software shortage. I can't imagine I need to refute those claims in this column, but needless to say I took some exception to them. It's may be a good thing for all of us that I was not there when this person was giving his pitch. My friends knew me and trusted my opinion, but the PC sales person was making sense to them until I explained my thoughts on the issues. The point is that the Mac mystique and some detailed explanations from me turned them around. We should be picking up their new iMac DV this weekend. I will be picking up my sister's 350 MHz iMac sometime after the first of November so we can take advantage of the US$400 Compuserve rebate. The truly interesting thing is that it was the very same PCs that had tempted her at work with their evil ways that proved their own undoing. It seems that at any given time, the PC network, PC servers, or individual PC computers she and her co-workers use are in "Crash mode." She was also on first name basis with the entire IT tech support team for this company, as were all her office mates. That's the best sales job for a Mac that I have encountered yet. It also helped that her 6 year old Mac has not crashed once in the last two years. Reality can be a harsh mistress sometimes. Considering how long I have been encouraging my friends and my sister to buy either a new Mac or an iMac, it was truly rewarding to have it finally pay off. It will be even more rewarding to help set up both of these computers and get them going on the Internet, especially with my computer newbie friends. Do you have a story about evengelism that paid off? Tell us all about it in The Back Page forums! Your comments and hate mail can be sent to [email protected]. |