My father in law recently bought a Mac. A powerbook, to be exact. That entire side of the family is really into Macs, and his powerbook is an upgrade from a pre-OSX computer. It's a big step really, as this is his first portable computer. And he got rid of his desktop altogether.

Now, there was a dilemma in his recent purchase. He was this close " (see the space in the middle of the apostrophe?) from getting an x86 laptop at Circuit City, or maybe even a Dell or similar.

He did some exploring, however, and decided to stick with the Mac. He wanted a system that was intuitive, easy to figure out, nice looking, and would just work. Looking at Dell, it appears as if he could have saved over $1000 by going x86, but it was worth it to him.

Same with his printer and wireless. I hadn't seen these before, but apparently Apple has a wireless router / print server all in one. At the time, he spent $150 on it, as it was something that could just be plugged in and would work. I'm not familar with such a nice looking equivalent in the x86 world, but buying a wireless router and printer server seperatly would be under $100. But that's okay, he wants to be able to plug it all in, get it working, without having to bother us or anyone else to get it up and running.

I was a bit excited over all this, as he was going to have a nice setup at his house. I could bring my PDA or laptop over there and hop on the Net to do, well, whatever :-)

I hadn't been to his house much since last Christmas when he got all of this. Shana and I went over there this past weekend to meet up with him and some other folks. I stuffed my Zaurus into my back pocket, this was going to be fun to try out. Maybe I could show off my slick device a bit :-)

When I got there, I noticed something about the Mac wireless routers that I didn't know. They completely masked their signature when running (something I thought only enemy ships in Star Trek did to their warp trail), my Zaurus couldn't even see it. I know he was on the Net, he had just been using his laptop as we arrived. I'm not sure how it did it, but it seemed like a nice security feature. A device for people who don't necessarily know (or want to know) a lot about computers adding a significant layer of security. Hackers won't break into a network they can't see.

Then I looked a bit closer, and saw not one, but two cables coming out from his laptop. And even closer inspection revealed that one was ethernet. Aha! That's why I don't see the wireless.

I inquired as to why he wasn't using his new hi-tech gadgets. Apparently, he couldn't get them to work. Actually, not only could he not get them to work, but the Mac guru's in the family couldn't get them to work either (all the kings horses and all the kings men). The only way he could both get on the network, and be able to use the printer, was to not use the wireless (it's a bit more complicated than that, but we'll leave those details for anyone volunteering to help :-)

So, he happily announced that he was going to travel to Philadelphia, to the "local" Mac shop, to have them upgrade his machine to Tiger (which I believe he was, at this point, too nervous to do himself), as well as get the printer and wireless goodies working. They will certainly be able to get it working, while gladly taking what's left of his wallet. And he'll have a smile on his face the whole time, because he spent more money for the better product that just works :-)

The term Cognitive Dissonance is the first thing that comes to mind here (actually, it wasn't -- I thought of the idea, it took me an hour to remember the name for that :-)

While I suspect this situation isn't the norm, I can't help but be amused at the bigger picture.

After all is said and done, he'll have been some $1500 - $2000 richer if he had gone with a Dell, a Netgear router, and seperate wireless print server. Anyone -- including the kid across the street from him -- could have helped get those three things working. He'd be using them now (it's been since Christmas!), not waiting for when it's convenient to go to Philly to have someone else fix it. Yes, he'd be more prone to spyware in XP. But with the firewall in SP2, as well as using Firefox over IE, I think that could be minimized (my parents -- using Firefox, XP SP2, and good surfing habits, have very little Spyware trouble).

Actually, as a teacher -- his primary apps are Word, Excel, web based email, and surfing the Net. Even Linux could handle that well, though being a Gentoo user, I'm not prepared to say that's easier to setup than a Mac :-)

I can only hope that he's gaining something else by his choice of OS, such as improved usability in his day to day work.