Mom And My Mac (oh and one robot)
So Christmas was a great break for me this year. For the first time in (several) years I was able to catch up on Christmas gifts. It’s tough buying for your parents and family, especially when they tend to acquire the things they need as they need them. This year I was able to surprise my Mom though. She’s always used computers (starting with Honeywells and IBM’s back in the sixtie’s) and particularly over the last few years she’s used her Win2K machine to coordinate her various charity and activist activities, as well as keep in touch with family and friends. When your Mom is a regular computer user you learn some interesting things, like how to support Word over the phone, and just how late she stays up on Instant Messenger.
About two years ago my Dad got my Mom a new’ish Win2k machine. It had a nice monitor and was relatively quick off the mark. My Mom had pretty much mastered it and the MS office tools she needed such as Outlook and Word. Of course like a lot of windows users (and I’m guessing a lot of Mom’s) my Mom’s computer seemed to get progressively slower. Every-time I was home it seemed to take me longer to clean it up, check for spyware, etc. etc. My Mom is a relatively advanced user, with Norton, Firefox and the various other protections we’ve kept up to date with. The thing is even with these efforts and her cautious computer behaviour her machine still got messed up by various windows oddities.
So for Christmas this year (and I think it surprised here a lot) I got her a brand new iMac G5. My Aunt finished the package with a digital camera and printer. It took me about an hour to set my Mom up with the new machine and both her and I are breathing easier at the more secure set up. One other factor I hadn’t considered is that with the widescreen display my Mom was able to configure her screen to present the fonts and resolution slightly larger, although it looks a bit odd to me I think it’s making a big difference in her ease of use.
Lot’s of people are writing about this, but I think there’s a real opportunity for Mac to get into the ‘Mom’ market. Switching is good. Derek wrote some more about fixing your parents computer here.
One last Christmas gift which was a big hit at my house was the Roomba Discovery SE from iRobot Corp. This thing actually works and despite the dog not liking it, it made short work of the kitchen floor. What was the name of the robot from the Jetsons… I need one of those. [Alastair reminded me it was ‘Rosie’.] Happy New Year everyone!