When my father made the decision to buy an iMac, it was a pretty huge leap of faith on his part. He's not a very technically-minded guy. It's one thing to use a Mac at work, with the entire IT department of a large university there to install software, perform backups, and be a safety net; it's another thing entirely to buy his own computer, set it up himself in his apartment, sign up with an ISP, etc. when his best source of technical support (yours truly) is a thousand miles away. But the iMac is the first computer he's ever seriously considered buying for his home, and it was inviting enough to get him to make the commitment.

As we had mentioned earlier, the night he brought the iMac home I was waiting for the phone call asking for "hand-holding" support: am I really supposed to plug this cable into that port, what's the flappy thing on the back of the keyboard, all that kind of stuff. But instead, when the call came, my father proudly told me that he had assembled the iMac entirely on his own and that it was up and running. It's not surprising that he was able to get the thing running without help-- after all, it's a really easy thing to do-- but it's rather significant that he felt comfortable enough with the iMac to do it all without even calling for encouragement or confirmation that he was doing the right thing. The whole look and feel of the machine just says "go ahead, I won't hurt you." Whereas your typical beige boxes are another story...

The next big hurdle (and we mean "big" in a very relative sense, as all of the iMac's hurdles are quite small) was getting online. After getting the iMac set up and running, he had decided to explore the system for a couple of days before trying to sign up with an ISP and connecting to the Internet. That, I figured, was the task for which I would probably need to be available for phone support, given all the little things that can go wrong, all the control panels that might need to be tweaked, and all the other stuff that can make setting up a computer for internet access such a trial. So imagine my surprise and delight to receive email from my father late last night, with a subject line of "test" and sent via his brand new EarthLink account. (As it turns out, they do have a dialin in his town, though for some reason it doesn't show up on their web site.) Once again, my father goes it alone, and I only hear about the process after the fact. Why? Because the Mac OS is almost as inviting and non-threatening as the iMac's physical design. It encourages exploration and doesn't punish people who try. (And the EarthLink Total Access software is a marvel, too.)

Of course, the fact that my dad is getting along so well with his iMac means that my tech support role is somewhat diminished. Without crises, I'm more of a knowledge base than an emergency problem-solver. But to a certain extent, I think my father can pick up most of what he needs to know simply by using his iMac. Kudos to Apple for passing the Dad Test. As my father said in his first iMac email message, "Slowly but surely, I am learning."