Mac mini Case Study: Is the Mac mini right for mom?
My mom is not a geek. I would consider her a typical computer user 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?
To read the full article, please check out the full text at aaronadams.net.
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?
To read the full article, please check out the full text at aaronadams.net.