Evangelizing OS X

I tend to evangelize things that I enjoy. ReplayTV and adidas are good examples of that. Obviously Apple products are things that I enjoy, and I evangelize them as well.

I've been working on my parents to switch for awhile. Thus far it has been casual pressure. It pains me to watch my father toss good money after bad software as he is on his 3rd round of Norton Systemworks. It pains me more when I have to sysadmin their computer. Even with all of that protection, they've still managed to pick up some nasty viruses. One afternoon troubleshooting a computer these days is too much. I've spent more than one working on that Sony beast.

Beast is a good word to describe it. It was a nice machine at the time, and my father got a good Black Friday deal at Best Buy, but it is old, slow, and worst of all, loud. Their office is attached to their bedroom and there's no way I could sleep in the same room as that pile of whine.

In my opinion, an iMac is perfect for them. Very few wires, no extra tower, quiet, and more than powerful enough for them. The sticking point has been OS X. I don't blame them. Switching your OS is not an easy thing. Lucky for them, you can now drift from Windows to OS X. Between Parallels and Boot Camp, you have a great Windows crutch.



My latest tactic has been to sell them Leopard, not so much because they'd like Leopard better than Tiger, but because Apple is selling Leopard with their great guided tours. I decided to burn the Leopard and iLife '08 tours to DVD for them to watch. They don't have broadband, so it would be a tough sell to have them download the tours themselves. I fired up iDVD (for the first time) and was delighted to see how easy it was to get the videos in the DVD. I was even able to pull the iMac commercial from apple.com and drop it in the animated drop zone. It turned out slick and I hope they actually take the time to watch it. In any case, it was fun to make.