McElroy - 101 Reasons : to switch to the Mac

The Friday after I bought my first Mac (the classic 12-inch PowerBook G4 pictured in ), I had to mock up 78 files for a publisher's art department. Each file contained a small amount of text, plus four big, fat, high-resolution images.

Figure 1. I still love my very first Mac: the classic 12-inch PowerBook G4. (Image courtesy of Apple.)

I'd done this before on my Windows-based PC. Because Photoshop or Microsoft Publisher would crash every other hour, the project took two days to complete. But my Mac didn't crashnot during editing, not during saving, not during printing. As a result, the job took just two hours.

Weary of losing data to crashes? Tired of figuring out which .ini file is calling on that .dll file that you erased from your computer last week? Alarmed by unexplained hard drive chatter? Sick of printers, scanners, and other peripherals that plug and don't play?

The number one reason for switching to the Mac is simple: it just works .

My friend Phil has an iMac on his desk, along with an Apple wireless keyboard and mouse. To the untrained eye, the iMac looks like nothing more than a sleek flat-panel screen on a stylish stand. His Windows-based co-workers can't believe their eyes. "Where's the big box that goes under your desk? And where are all the snaky cables?"

Not long ago, I sat down at a coffee shop in Clayton, Georgia, and started answering email. In the course of an hour, four strangers paused at my table, nodded at my Mac, and said, "Nice."

At a family reunion, my tech-savvy nephew borrowed my Mac. When he minimized a window, it curled up and slid sensuously down to the lower edge of the screen. He raised an eyebrow and whistled. "Very cool."

Mac hardware is sexy. Mac software looks great onscreen. You spend several hours a day staring at a little box. Shouldn't that little box make you oooh and aaah?

While working as a computer instructor, I heard new computer users say the same things over and over:

"Why do I have to click Start to shut down my computer?"

"But what if I want to uninstall Internet Explorer?"

"Why does my computer keep interrupting my work to ask questions about icons on my desktop?"

Now that I'm introducing people to the Mac, I hear very different comments:

"Is that all there is to making a DVD?"

"So I can just attach my digital camera, and my Mac does the rest?"

"How did my Mac automatically know I had hooked it up to my TV?"

While Windows newbies are struggling with nested menus and obscure driver issues, new Mac users are downloading music, watching movies, and getting work done. I've introduced beginners to both systems, and I'm convinced: Macs are better for beginners.

The last time I set up a new Windows PC, I spent a good half-hour sifting through the metric ton of packaging, trashing 14 full-color leaflets, and peeling the third-party vendor stickers off the merchandise. After being forced to activate and register my software, I lost another half-hour Googling instructions for translating my wireless network password into a 30-character hexadecimal equivalent.

By contrast, my Mac came in an elegant box with minimal packaging. As it booted for the first time, it asked me simple questions in plain English. It automatically found my wireless home network, asked me for the password, and connected. In 15 minutes, I was good to go.

Want to start working or playing as soon as possible? Setting up a Mac is easy.

A friend and I were in the Detroit airport. A late flight had compressed our two-hour layover down to a few precious minutes. Before boarding a long flight to Japan, we both wanted to check email.

My friend pulled out a Windows laptop; I pulled out my Mac.