I’m not going to jump into the whole Mac vs. PC debate right now because, amongst many other things, its tiresome.  But John C. Dvorak, eternal curmudgeon of almost all things technology has recently declared that “Macs Are All Right” after using them regularly for a few months, and I can’t help but chime in a few thoughts of my own — because, heck, this is my blog.

Mr. Dvorak extolls how the Mac OS is “elegant”, and performs many of the same tasks PC’s do with aplomb (my word, not his), but also describes how he’s been recommending Mac’s to his friends.  He says, in fact

“Should I recommend something that will come back to haunt me, or recommend a Mac with its higher price but lower hassle factor?” The answer is simple. I hate the idea of having to do customer service for people who cannot keep their systems clean, and that’s most people.”

I found myself in a similar position about a year ago when my brother was looking for a new laptop.  I should preface this story with saying that my brother’s a smart kid.  Its not really fair to call him a kid, but when your kid brother is your kid brother, he’s always going to be referred to as “kid” in some fashion or another — even if he’s taller than you now (but I outweigh him!).  Anyway, he’s a smart kid.  After all he’s finishing a residency in a pediatric *neurology* for pete’s sake, and after he’s done he’ll have done so much schooling his own children (who aren’t even born yet) will probably finish grade school before he finishes his post grad training.

But he’s also one of these guys who just doesn’t have any luck with PC’s.  Maybe its the kind of PC’s he bought when he went away to University — the bargain basement kind from local PC stores where they begin and end all their prices with the number 8 (maybe you know what I mean).  But every single PC he’s had — something’s gone wrong.  Inexplicable hardware failures.  Unimaginable operating system disasters.  Software errors that just didn’t make anyway sense — but clearly existed.

The reason why he ran into so many problems might be traced to shoddy parts, but I think (and maybe he’ll admit this as well), that there were certain problems that could be traced back to “operator-dependent” issues.

Anyway, when it came time to look for a new laptop, he asked me for my recommendation for one that “Just worked”.  I suggested he get something from Apple, and he’s never looked back.  He’s using parallels so he’s able to use some PC applications without any difficulty.  But the best part is that he hasn’t suffered any computing related disasters that he did before.

If I was mean, prone to giving cheap shots and the like, I might say something like “his new Macbook prevented him from doing anything stupid to it”.  But I’m not, so I won’t.  :)

Rather, irrespective of what problems he had with his initial set of PC’s, his Macbook hasn’t given him any problems so far — and for that, I’m grateful, both as the family tech support person *and* someone genuinely happy for him. The Dvorak in me would echo similarly cynical sentiments like “its more expensive but it just works and avoids more problems on my behalf”.  The more brother in me is just happy that he’s not wasting his time ranting and railing about how useless his computer is, but rather, spending his more profitably — such as working on his research for children with stroke.  Not, say, reading endless articles about professional wrestling.

Nah, he’d never that. ;)