lazymuoio said:
although i do not own a mac myself and am saving money for one my friend was recently in the market for a laptop and i told him to check out apple; he said no that apple sucks and he was gonna get a dell,ewww, why does dell attract people and why do people thing macs are dumb and dont work please enlgihten me
personally, if I were a Windows user, and I saw all these things (people complaining about white spots on 15" powerbooks, the 15" pb battery exchange, the iBook G3 logic board of death, all these problems with Apple laptops), I wouldn't get a Mac either. However, desktops are awesome...but expensive...I dunno.
Here's my reasoning (generally) for dealing with people buying a new computer.
You have to respect people's decisions. Sometimes they get PCs because they have no choice, sometimes because they have Windows only software they need for job/school that wont run well in VPC, sometimes they're gamers. Those people I will leave alone, because theres no point to convincing them to get a Mac.
Now if they were average people who just surf the web, do a little word processing, et cetera...then I might butt in with a suggestion to check out a Mac. Give them the address of a local Apple store, let them use a Mac and see how nice Safari and Office is (yeah right rofl). I'd also point them in the direction of the nearest Fry's or a geek who would be willing to build them a new PC.
If they can't afford it, or they're not willing to spend more than a few hundred dollars, I'd leave them alone, and maybe offer to build them a cheap PC. Why force them to spend $800 or even more on a Mac?
If they're students, I'd probably suggest how portable the laptops are, and the wide compatibility with lots of things. I'd show them how SubEthaEdit is great for note taking with other Mac users, I'd show them Xcode, I'd show them Photoshop, or whatever they like. If they're gamers, then Halo, UT...unless they're hardcore, then see above.
If they're developers, then I'd show them the Xcode tools, dports/portage/fink, PPC linux, SubEthaEdit, some awesome dev tools, the way everything works on a Mac. Of course a *BSD/Linux/whatever box would do just fine, but some people want to develop stuff on the Mac platform, thats awesome.
If they're linux users, how about the more geeky BSD foundations of OS X, or alll the other different flavours of Linux out there for PPC.
Of course, some people still believe in myths regarding Macs. I'd then discuss with them why some of them are true, why some aren't.
But that's just me. I don't think its right to force someone into buying a new computer, but I believe they should be informed before they go and buy one. Let them know the bad and good sides of Windows, Mac OS, Linux, FreeBSD, whatever they want to use. Let them choose.