…but I did make a convert this weekend. ^.^
“A convert to what?” you ask.
Why, the Cult of Mac?, of course!
A friend of mine had asked me to take her shopping for a new laptop a couple months ago, and I readily agreed. Who am I to turn down the chance to go tech shopping on somebody else’s dime? I’d asked her what she was looking for and how much she was looking to spend.
Her preferences:
Windows XP in English
able to accept input in either Japanese or English
English MS Office and other applications
easy of use (she’s not a geek)
not horridly expensive
My first question – Have you considered a Mac?
She was dead set against it, saying she didn’t want to have to relearn everything about how to use the computer. I told her she didn’t need to. A Mac would do everything she needed without causing her any headaches like her old PC laptop. (In all fairness, her old laptop was just that – old.) I also told her she’d have effortless switching between languages and could even boot the OS in either English or Japanese, switching every menu from one language to the other.
She still wasn’t having it.
So I did the legwork, tracking down English systems in Akihabara and from the online PC sellers. There was a big price premium to be paid for a non-Japanese laptop, but she was okay with that. On the day we were supposed to go shopping she called and told me she wasn’t feeling well, so the whole thing ended up getting postponed. Schedules and vacations and all sorts of stuff pushed our shopping trip back further and further – until last weekend.
We made plans to meet up in Akiba (the shortened name for Akihabara) and hooked up at the station. We checked out the duty free section of Laox and looked at the English PC laptops there. Not bad machines, but not great deals for the money either. We spent the next 90 minutes or so cruising from one shop to another, asking about the ease of converting a Japanese laptop PC to English XP, and got about the same response everywhere we went – void warranty, at your own risk, bad idea, blahblahblah.
So I asked her, “would you at least just come look at a Mac?”
She agreed and we headed off to the Sofmap Mac store. Once there, I commandeered a display iBook G4 and gave her the tour. The first thing I did was reboot it so the OS was in English, and she thought that was pretty slick. I then showed her how easy it was to change the text entry from English to Japanese and back again. She dug that too. Then we got into the applications and included software. (She’s getting a digital camera soon and liked iPhoto a lot.)
30 minutes later, she bought one.
The price was good and they had a nice deal on memory upgrades if you got one right when you bought a system. I’m kinda jealous, since she actually got a better computer than me now. (I’ve got an iBook G4 s well, but hers is faster and has more memory than mine.) It’s all good, though. For doing a good job selling her on it, she let me put the points from the sale on my Sofmap card, so now I’ve got ¥7,500 in store credit to spend there.
Sweet! ^.^
We’re going shopping for her digital camera this weekend, and she’s already said I can have those points as well. It’s kinda funny. PC friends who help other friends buy PCs always seem to end up doing free tech support. Mac friends get free stuff.
Which kind of friend would you rather be? ^.^