I'm writing this post to you from darkest New Jersey, and on a Mac. I've spent the bulk of my day setting up this fancy new 17-inch iMac G5 for my maternal grandparents on the advice of, well, me.

I've used Macs before, and am fairly familiar with them. When my grandparents said that they were looking into buying a computer and wanted me to teach them how to use it, I insisted that they get a Mac. With my nearly godlike ability to see the future, I knew that dealing with my grandparents dealing with spyware and viruses was not what I would consider a good time.

Today, while patiently and repeatedly explaining to them the function of the SHIFT key, I thanked myself for the foresight.

Thoughts from years of casually using Macs and a day of teaching them:

• The keyboard action is great. However, the modifier keys are all backwards, and HOME and END don't function the way I expect them to.


• The default mouse sucks and gets confused easily.


• The new Quicktime 7 High-Def codecs are awesome.


• OSX is great, but if Apple really wants to go for the 'computer-neophyte' market, they should at least pretend to obey their own Human Interface Guidelines.


• OSX is smooth, though, and very responsive.


• Spotlight is frighteningly useful. Exposé, too. Spring-loaded folders make me giddy, even if they're not as cool as they were in OS9.


• Their Character Map is better than ours.


• The iMac disc drive is surprisingly loud. The keyboard cable is surprisingly short.


• I wish browsing through a windows FAT32 partition didn't leave hidden indexing files all over the place.


• Having a full BASH shell to drop down to at a moment's notice is nice.


• I miss the other six (count em!) buttons on my mouse. The old folks probably wouldn't appreciate them, though. (Yes, I know you can USE a mouse like that on a Mac, but I don't have one with me, do I?)


• There really needs to be an easy way of making all the text bigger.


• Listening to my iPod through these tinny little speakers sucks.


• F13-F16? What's that about?


• Every text field on OSX 10.4 has built-in spellchecking (cool) and voice playback (cool once).


• Going from nothing to writing email in one day is, I believe, a big step. If I can get them using the web and sorting photos in iPhoto tomorrow, I'll be happy. I'd like to introduce them to the concept of the filesystem, but that means double-clicking. Double-clicking bad.


• Luke is the man. He helps normal people use their computers all week, then does the same for geeks on the weekend. If he didn't, I'd probably be in a world of pain right now.


• Macs call the backspace key 'delete'. They also call the delete key 'delete'. No, that doesn't confuse ANYONE who's never used a computer before.


• Remember that post I made yesterday? The internet isn't nearly as interesting in New Jersey. I'm dying for a copy of Photoshop so I can get some work done. Imagine that!


• I still want one.