Here's a quickie; we spent a few hours over the weekend volunteering some computer training time for the Activities Director at a nursing home. Unfortunately, the computer in question was some Compaq Presario running Windows 95, and while the experience may have warped our fragile little minds, we emerged otherwise unscathed. We covered a lot in three hours, and now she seems psyched to leap in and start creating. She can now add clip art to her AppleWorks-based newsletters. She understands that saving all her documents only to a floppy disk is just asking for data loss. She's thrilled that she can build her activities calendars by double-clicking the stationery we left on her desktop. The few hours we donated will save her days each month.

Anyway, the whole experience really drove home what Apple understands and what many of us forget. When the iMac (and now the iBook) is criticized for a lack of expandability, or a lack of legacy ports, or stuff like that, those criticisms are coming from "computer people." Now, you may not consider yourself a computer person, but trust us-- if you're tuning in to watch a daily soap opera about Apple Computer, you qualify as one for these purposes. See, the person we were training wasn't a computer person at all. She's been using this Compaq for months now and didn't even know that she could select text with the mouse and change its size-- she would backspace over entire paragraphs of existing text, set the font size, and then retype it all from scratch. That's the level of computer familiarity that Apple knows is out there: the people who really don't know anything about computers. These days, computers are increasingly essential tools, and we think Apple's creating products that can let "regular" people accomplish great things with a greatly reduced level of frustration.

So spending some time with a misconfigured Wintel box that crashes when the screensaver comes on and didn't allow the dragging of shortcuts to the desktop (we had to use Windows Explorer) really made us appreciate the iMac all that much more. The Activities Director we trained could do so much with just an out-of-the-box iMac; it has AppleWorks pre-installed, it's Internet-ready, and it's inviting and a joy to use, whereas the Compaq was viewed as a necessary evil. We're no longer surprised at the iMac's runaway success among first-time buyers, and we hope that Apple continues to simplify things for "normal people." (As long as they keep making systems that appeal to geeks like us, as well.)