My parents bought an eMac!

[sethwerkheiser]

After shopping around BestBuy, Circuit City, the HP website, and a bunch of local "I can build you a computer" places, my parents finally looked into Apple. I got them down to the Apple store in Philadelphia and they bought an eMac! It was a joyous evening

We got home late, so I wasn't able to show them a whole lot, but I got them on the internet in like, a minute, and we set up their ISP mail in about 20 seconds. They were mighty impressed.

I didn't set up their HP printer / scanner / copier. I had set this printer up on their old HP, and it seriously took like 30 minutes, with restarting and everything. This morning my dad told me they just plugged it into the USB port, hit print, and it worked (of course! I just didn't think my parents would be that brave)! They were printing grocery lists with Apple Works and a bunch of other stuff! It's so nice to hear my parents doing productive stuff, rather than hearing how they've run AdAware or SpyBot every morning.

He was telling me about GarageBand - my dad's been playing guitar for like 35+ years. I hope we can learn Garageband together (I just got it on my iBook) and he can record some of his original jazz composistions. That's gonna be nice!

My mom filled up her Address Book. She's got that working nicely with Mail.

Again - it's sooo nice to hear my parents being PRODUCTIVE with their computer, and not worrying about Norton Anti-Virus, doing Windows updates every few days (with a dial-up modem), and all that other stuff.

A funny thing - the rep who sold them the eMac forgot to put the AppleCare box in with the eMac... so we got home and we can't find the box. So my dad called him the next day and they're going to mail it to him. Nice touch

 

[sigamy]

Great story. You hit the nail on the head--your parents are going to be productive and not have to worry about as many headaches as they would in the PC world. Not to say that Macs are perfect--because they aren't and they will still have a problem here and there but nothing like the PC/Windows world.

Congrats and welcome to the Mac community to your folks!

 

[sethwerkheiser]

Oh yea, they know that. Heck, my iBooks logic board died - I never had a PC just die like that did. But they understand and such, and I think they'll be okay. They got the AppleCare with it, so if anything does go wrong they should be in good hands. Having the Apple store just 1.5 hours away is okay, too

 

[wPod]

now, if i could only get my parents to get an emac or such mac. . . i would stop getting calls that start with "my computer wont. . . "

 

[form]

You know, if Apple paid me, I could easily come up with a story just as interesting and positive for them.

 

[thirteen1031]

You know, if Apple paid me, I could easily come up with a story just as interesting and positive for them.

Dude, I was thinking the exact same thing!

Seth, you should mail your switcher story to Apple. I bet they post it on their switcher stories site. I was especially moved when you said you were looking forward to creating jazz with your dad on garageband.

Macs. They bring families together....

 

[sethwerkheiser]

haha.. good idea! I just sent them my story. That'd be neat to see it printed. My dad was all excited talking about GarageBand. A night and day difference from last week, when he was telling me how he runs SpyBot everyday

 

[hvfsl]

My dad introduced me to Macs. We were looking to get a new PC (in 1995) to replace our old 286. My dad went to the local John Lewis (big UK department store) and tried out the computers. They had a few Macs so he tried them out as well and found they were much better than the Windows 3.1 PCs of the time.

 

[FightTheFuture]

seth, a good idea for your mom would be to tell her how to backup her address book. its great having that filled up but good piece of mind to have a backup out there and to update the backups. same goes for email and bookmarks. it'll be good for them to see where everything is neatly stored, doncha think? good switcher story congrats on swaying someone! wish i could perk someones interest in a mac

 

[Mav451]

Dude, when my parents found out I had won an iBook at college ("are you serious?" - hahah, yeah that's rite I said), they had the usual questions.

My dad--is is compatible? Does it work with Office? (of course, but he works at a gov't place with Win 2000 all over the place -_-).

Mom? Is it easy? Again, she loved how nice it looked. It just pains me seeing her suffer using that p-o-s Compaq box from her workplace. B/c its Win2k, it makes it that much harder to do simple stuff like transfering pics from her digi cam to the computer. XP does this easily though, but her workplace adamantly refused to giver he an XP box. This is where an eMac would be extremely useful. Plus, most of her work is on M$ Office--so Office 2004/X should cover all of this.

She certainly doesn't game, so that has no application to her (while it still does to me 0_*). All she wants is stability--she'll get it. Heck, I'm considering to bring her to the Apple Store at MM since its so close now. Anything to make her life easier--cost is not an issue (like it is to me as a college studnet), so again, all the more reason for her to buy it.

 

[FuzzyBallz]

Congrats. Mail is awesome!