[Feathers]

It's a weird experience but in the past two months I have seen a significant number of PC using friends convert to Macintosh, even some incredibly irritating former Wintel die-hards. I have gone from being their friendly MacWeirdo to MacGuru in no time flat.Has anybody else honestly noticed this slow but steady creeping trend?

[reader50]

Wish I had. I have been showing the G4 off to a PC friend's son, who did not consider Macs seriously before.

He found the Halo movie very impressive and thinks I have a good computer now. But this could backfire...the Halo part that is...

[wlonh]

i know several peeps who have ditched their winteldrone ways and feel so much cleaner for it

32-bit clean of course

[RWoelk]

After a recent visit from Alaska , my girlfriend's sister wanting, and very much needing to get a new computer was inundated with all the so called bells and whistles of my girlfriends brand new and rather attractive looking(For a PC) Compaq 3555 Pentium 111 system. I, on the other hand, just let my G4 and airport readied FireWire PowerBook speak for themselves. Even as a long time PC user, her sister needed only gentle nudging to spend an afternoon on the G4. She seemed to completely immersed...OK, OK... I may have cheated here a little by pointing her to the Apple Masters QuickTime site do help sell it along a bit, but she did plenty of other surfing and exploring of the system on her own.

Remembering now back on one balmy evening outside on the patio, I recall the two sisters arguing over the two platforms with her sister commenting on my girlfriends love of programing and troubleshooting. "I just want to get on the damn computer and do what I need to do without having to solve puzzles about how to do this that and other." See, you enjoy that sort of thing and I don't." Her sister then turned to ask me with disbelief if the QuickTime video I had streaming over the internet on my PowerBook sitting on the patio table between them was really coming through my cable modem via airport. I smiled and told her to pick any of the number of QuickTime videos at Apple's web site and take the PowerBook to any place in or around the house she wished. She did so with complete amazement. Oh, yes, lest I not forget... Playing DVDs s-videoed from PowerBook over the big screen TV for this movie addict was a nice added bonus. I actually had a little trouble one night with doing this, wherein, TechTool Pro remedied the situation handily. My girlfriend made some glib comment about Apple's software when I pointed out to her that the few minutes it took in running TechTool Pro completely troubleshot my entire system including Ram... I reminded her of a memory problem and an issue with her modem with her system that for weeks she had yet to solve. After that retort, she made no further comments that evening and quietly sat back and watched the DVD.

Within 24 hours after the sisters return to Anchorage, she wrote back stating she had purchased an identical G4 to mine with a promise to later purchase FireWire PowerBook. She wrote with such glee and enthusiasm detailing to us and all her friends and family each and every facet of her new G4 such that it seemed as if she had found nirvana.

Yep... Macs just have a way of making one smile... It's like coming home.

------------------
Rocke "Why yes, I have brought our
network down." Woelk

Only the educated are free!-Epictetus

[This message has been edited by RWoelk (edited 07-15-2000).]

[mac freak]

I have one Wintel friend that, after hearing a lot about Mac OS X, has decided that he wmight convert sometime in near future...

Especially if Apple releases a version of OS X for Intel chips (he recently got a new computer--a PIII 800. I guess my iMac 350 will be behind in the Processor Wars for a bit. That is, until I get my G4).

I can only hope that he does switch...
even if it does require buying a new computer...

[blizzard]

I have one friend who went and bought a G4 because she is interested in graphic design, and has not seemed to regret the decision, even if all my PC friends who used to mock me are now making her their primary target..but we stick together, so it's not too bad. I had another who was seriously considering it for a time, but then saw Quake 3 playing on my aforementioned friend's G4 and decided that a Mac was not his way...too slow and jerky, he said. Unfortunately, the problem was caused by the fact that the G4 had no less than three mouse drivers in the extensions folder, each for a completely different brand of mouse, so I fixed that problem in no time flat. But alas, the magic was gone; he recently purchased an Athlon 800/GeForce 2 GTS, pretty much solely for the purpose of games. So it's no big loss, if you buy a Mac solely for games you'd wind up being dissappointed anyway and go around and badmouth Macs to everyone else, so I figure we're all the better for it. Those are the only two though; everyone else still won't even consider it. And when you add in that two years ago a guy who was even bigger into Macs than I bought a PC for games...I'd say it's just evening out right now.

[Feathers]

Interesting about the "three mouse drivers" thing. On three occasions I have had to undo the damage caused by supposed authorised resellers helping things along by pre-installing stuff, but it would appear that they do the install but never actually run the program. I get these panicked calls along the lines of "...this Macintosh sh*t...I should never have listened to you...etc..." Ironically, the fixes have been simple but also each occasion occured over a weekend where the friends took delivery of their Macs on a Friday afternoon. Three days can do a lot to take the gloss off a new machine, and sometimes they never quite recover from the initial disappointment, they somehow re-remember that DosBoxes were better than they actually were. Here on my planet(!) Macs seem to be sold exclusively by idiots.

[MacNZ]

I have a few friends who switched to mac. A few of them are about to switch back to PC though because of the bad experiences they have had with the Apple dealers they went to. I felt sorry for one friend who bought a whole suite of new G3's a year ago for his sports agency. They were having a fire drill and the sprinklers went off, wrecking all the computers. They got insurance but went to Dell for their replacement systems because of the bad support they'd gotten.
I have persuaded the other half of my family to get macs though and they are going fine. I'm currently working on converting a few more friends and hopefully it will be successful.