I find that OS X is not at all intrusive and condescending as is the latest Windows OS — which will not shut up and get out of the way and let a person work.

The difficulty for Windows users is that Apple makes using the computer intuitive so that people, accustomed to thinking of the most difficult way of getting things done, overlook the simplest way to get a thing done.

And, no, I would not give up my 3-year old iBook for March 2004 Windows machine.

And i would guess that there’s someone around who would not mind taking over your tech-support duties. We Mac-cultists like talking about our machines, sort of like sports car fanatics…

As for price, if you compare with PC’s equiped to do the same stuff, such as download digital video via Firewire and edit it, you will find that Macs are no more expensive. But of course you may not want to do those things…

For the average persons needs, Mac isn’t going to give the best bang for the buck. Apple specialized itself long ago, and if one doesn’t use computers for the handful of tasks that Mac’s evolved around the brand is more trouble than it’s worth.

That said, I’m a cult of Macintosh guy myself (Macboy?!), and like Scotch drinkers, we don’t imagine that the taste we’ve acquired is appropriate for most other people.

I’ve been a long-time Mac basher, but, despite the high cost and lower performance of the hardware, OSX is decent. It’s levels above the nasty and unstable n.x versions. Once you get everything set up, it should run quite happily without a whole lot of nasty fixing it.

There really aren’t any advantages to OS X vs. Windows 2000 / XP, or killer apps like graphics and multimedia used to be. But there aren’t really any serious drawbacks either (except for choice of hardware or fewer software titles available). It comes down to if you feel comfortable working with a Unix based system (however pretty the facade), and if the UI works for you.

It doesn’t work for me, but the Macboys love the hell out of it. It is certainly not any ‘easier’ to use.

But yes, it is a bit of a gamble to recommend a system you don’t know firsthand. It could have been a lot worse though; you could have recommended a PC with Linux…

The big remaining user-interface advantage of the Macintosh isn’t anything having to do with the system itself, but with its user-interface conventions; the Macintosh world is a much more consistent one. Copy, Paste, etc. are always the same keys on a Macintosh; this isn’t true, even now, in Windows (terminal programs in particular tend to use strange keystrokes, because the usual Windows keystrokes, Control-C and Control-V, are used for other things). Setting the preferences in a Windows application is a challenge, because the preferences might be under any menu, and they might be called ‘options’, ‘settings’, ‘tools’, ‘preferences’, ‘defaults’, ‘properties’, or something else entirely. The worst applications have both ‘options’ and ‘settings’. On the Macintosh, very few applications break the rules, which makes a big difference.

That said, your friend can change the Mac’s default application for those Excel files by selecting one, selecting ‘Get Info’ from the file menu, clicking on ‘Open with’ in the resulting window, selecting Appleworks (or whatever), and pushing the ‘Change All’ button. I can’t believe you didn’t find this, as it’s not hidden at all, and anyone would expect to be able to make global changes to system preferences by selecting a single file and messing around with its settings.