Reply #22: I've been a Mac person since 1986

[Lydia Leftcoast]

They're sturdy, reliable, easy to use, and if you're in a large city, there's probably an Apple Store that offers walk-in support.

I'm not a techie, so I want something that I don't have to fiddle with a lot for word processing in English and Japanese, e-mail, Internet surfing, and the small amount of spreadsheet work I need for my freelance business.

I'm not a gamer. In fact, I was already in my twenties when Pong and Asteroids came out, so the availability or non-availability of games is a non-issue for me. I don't do CAD, either, and I understand that is another area where PCs are better.

I'm typing this on a 12" iBook bought in September 2004 for traveling to Japan. It's now my principal computer, although that's not what I intended. It's just so much handier than my January 2000 desktop iMac, which is still running, but doesn't offer the freedom that the iBook does. The iBook was $1500, including extra memory, an Airport card, and a dealer-installed Microsoft Office.

It works great, but it's a bit small for some of the assignments I do (like the ones that require me to translate PDFs of oversize documents) so I'm saving up for something with a larger screen. (My desktop has a 14.5" screen.) The screen size is my only complaint.

It doesn't crash. Even if an individual program crashes, the system does not, thanks to the newer Unix-based OS.