Why a Mac?
It is more expensive. You have less features or equipment for the same price. You don’t have the choice between so many brands (with so many clones!). You don’t ever have many choices of antivirus or firewalls! lol!
I am an IT guy, and a mac “fan boy”, so my advices may be biased…
Instead of my advices, let’s start talking about my mother. She’s 70 now, and someone that aechived many things in her life. I love her as anyone should love it’s parent. But with time, she’s not the same person I knew when she was young. She’s still active, and need web access, email, Skype, printing service, and so on…
I ask her to buy a Mac, 4 years ago. A PowerBook 12″ that she might take on her travels (she’s traveling anywhere in the world, she’s a kinda globetrotter!), you know with this limited PowerPC 1.5Ghz chip, 2GB RAM, 60GB hard-drive… This kinda junk laptop by today.
Today, this laptop is connected wirelessly, print on a Epson printer/scanner/fax, traveling the world, having a great autonomy after 4 years of usage, and look mint with it’s aluminium design. Everything is great, she even use Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger instead 10.5 Leopard. She doesn’t worry about viruses or hacking. she’s just using it. This is a simple as that.
And if you think about a 4 years old PC, throwing it to a senior, and expecting it to work flawlessly for years, without any remote management (I do setup one naturally, but didn’t use it), and have the people happy about it, even when it’s an old computer, it’s unusual.
It’s just value. This is where Mac are obvious choices. When you expect the work to be done, the computer to stay fresh after years of travelling and usage, and the user to be focus on their work, instead of worrying about viruses, updates, firewalls, …
