Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

My mom is not a geek. I would consider her a typical computer user Ñ she is able to learn to do specific tasks she wants to do and has specific uses for her machine. She uses it for things like online banking, simple word processing, e-mail, reading about certain topics on the web, and so on. She has no idea what the term “headless” means and doesn’t know the difference between a CD and a DVD. She just wants a computer that works and is simple to use. She’s a perfect candidate to own a Mac.

Until the summer of 2004, my mother used my old PC, a home-built 233 MHz Pentium MMX machine running Windows 98, that I gave her before I replaced it with a home-built 550 MHz Pentium III system in 1999. Her machine had a 15-inch CRT monitor, a 1.08 GB hard drive, 256MB RAM, a typical sound card (the specs of which I can’t remember), and a Matrox graphics card. It was a good machine for its time, and it had done what mom needed it to do. At some point, my brother used it for a week or so and it became infested with the worst porn spyware I’d ever seen, and no amount of cleaning by AdAware, Spybot S&D, or other anti-spyware software could completely clean it off. Since the machine was more than 6 years old, since the drive was running out of space, since the monitor was getting soft, almost to the point of being unreadable, since the machine had been made unbearably slow by spyware that couldn’t be removed and wouldn’t stop coming, I decided she needed a new machine.

Mom is not a person of many means, so it was up to me to purchase a machine for her as a gift. Had the Mac mini been available at the time, it certainly would have been a Mac model I would have considered. The rest of this case study is intended to be a thought experiment of sorts, going back in time and applying current products to past circumstances. To state it another way, if mom still owned that same aged PC today, how would the Mac mini stand up as a replacement option? After all, switchers with old or broken PCs are part of Apple’s stated target market for the device. Apple intends switchers to drop the Mac mini in place of the PC with the current display, keyboard, and mouse still in tact. Would that have worked for mom?

As in other case studies, I wish to state my thesis up front so the reader may compare the story to my thoughts about the Mac mini:

Thesis:
The Mac mini will sell primarily to persons interested in an additional Mac, to persons or institutions with special needs or circumstances, and organizations that already own Macs. The Mac mini will do little to draw switchers from other platforms. The best way for Apple to attract switchers is through a sustained marketing campaign highlighting the advantages of products such as, but not limited to, OS X and the iLife suite, not via an inexpensively priced headless computer.

A stock low-end Mac mini would have fit what mom wanted to do just fine. The Mac mini can run Panther and a handful of low- or medium-load apps just fine, and that’s what mom does: e-mail, web browsing, simple word processing, etc. Mom doesn’t own a digital camera or a video camera, so most of iLife would be initially unimportant to her, not that she would know what iLife is anyway because Apple doesn’t bother to advertise it. iTunes would probably be useful. Mom has a CD collection and the idea of burning her own compilation CDs or listening to music on an iPod appeals to her. So we’ll start with the Mac mini at $499.

As stated previously, mom’s monitor was going soft, and much of the picture was blurred to the point of being practically unreadable. Factor in mom’s age Ñ she’s in her mid-fifties Ñ and her subsequent less-than-perfect eyesight, and the monitor would need to be replaced. So why not pick up a new monitor to go with the Mac mini while I’m at the Apple store? The problem is, Apple doesn’t carry any third-party monitors, and the cheapest display Apple sells is $999. I’m gainfully employed, but not to the point where I can spend almost $1500 on a new computer for mom, so the Apple display is out. Acquiring a display would necessitate a trip to an electronics store near me, and a 17-inch monitor would be the best inexpensive fit for mom’s eyes. The least expensive 17-inch CRT monitor I can track down in Dayton, Ohio, is $142. The Mac mini changeover now costs $641.

Mom’s mouse and keyboard both have PS/2 connectors and the Mac mini requires USB connectors. Converters can be purchased, although I don’t believe they’re common, but some keys on a Mac keyboard don’t map very well to 6 year-old PC keyboards (the command key jumps to mind Ñ mom’s old keyboard doesn’t have an equivalent key that would map to it). As mom learns to use Panther and learns to do new things with her computer, it would be confusing to an amateur such as her to have a key that was supposed to be “command” but was missing, a key that was supposed to be “option” but was really “alt”, a missing CD eject key, and so on. For the sake of simplicity and compatibility, an Apple mouse and keyboard are needed. Add $58. The Mac mini now costs $699, approximately $100 less than an eMac.

If mom would need any upgrade to her Mac in the next several years, it would probably be additional RAM. It’s not unthinkable that mom could get a digital camera and if she were to run iPhoto, 512MB RAM would be a simple, inexpensive upgrade for an eMac, considering I could buy the RAM locally and install it myself. If the Mac mini would need to be upgraded, it would need to be taken to an Apple service center and possibly shipped out, depending on the circumstances. There is no current indication that I can purchase third-party RAM and have Apple install it, so I will make the assumption that Apple will install Apple RAM at the Apple price, $75 (plus possible fees, according to the website, which are unspecified). Plus, if I’d be purchasing a 17-inch CRT for mom anyway, why not purchase a complete system that would be the same size as the monitor alone? This is a personal judgment call, but in my mind, the $100 up front is worth eliminating the extra hassle and expense of asking Apple to install RAM in the Mac mini down the road.

When the numbers are added up, it’s reasonable to say that the eMac is a competitor to the Mac mini in this situation, which I consider typical, and if this situation were to play out now instead of 6 months ago, I would probably have chosen the eMac over the Mac mini. I’m sure there are a number of other potential Mac mini buyers who would agree. A $100 price difference between a just-introduced Mac mini and an already-existing eMac isn’t a big enough difference to draw switchers based on price alone.

In real life, I purchased mom a used Graphite iMac and bumped up the RAM to 512MB. It’s plenty fast for what she currently does, and it was the best decision at the time.

So the Mac mini wouldn’t be overwhelmingly compelling for mom. When Apple intends to sell a computer for switchers based on price, it’s only logical to start adding up numbers to see how other machines compare. Mom had an old computer with some failing and incompatible parts that needed to be repurchased, and I suspect the majority of switchers who would consider a Mac now are in her situation. It’s my belief that most non-geek computer users don’t have the right pieces and parts lying around the house, and those who want to replace an older computer are doing so because the computer they have is “broken” in some way or another, including hardware failures.

In this case, I haven’t spoken to mom’s reason for switching because it’s not a decision she made herself. I made it for her. As a competent computer professional, I decided to purchase a machine that best matched what she knows and what she does. After speaking in a very public forum and encouraging others to consider Macs for their next computer purchase, I was anxious to eat my own dog food and put mom, a typical computer user, behind a Mac.

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