Moving a senior citizen from windows to Apple?

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rg420rg420
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
My 85 year old mother-in-law uses a windows desktop to check email, surf the web and manage photos. That's pretty much all she does. Her computer is old and painfully slow, so it's time to upgrade. I could just get her a cheap new windows desktop, but I am concerned about the increasingly sophisticated viruses out there, via forwarded emails from her friends, as well as from Facebook (yes she's on there!). Also she has a hard time dealing with the digital camera to computer interface. So one alternative I considered: buying her a used Mac Mini (her current monitor and keyboard are newer and quite good). I figured it would be easier for her to use, as well as safer. However, I've chatted with an Apple store salesman, and he thought this was a bad idea. Before I give it up, I wanted to see what kind of advice I could find here.

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  • Reply 1 of 1
    Marvinmarvin Posts: 15,585moderator
    If Apple would make the iPad a master device, I'd probably recommend that but until you can manage photos and documents on it, I can't.



    I'd actually just get a Mini anyway. If she doesn't like the Mac system, put Windows on it and it's still a decent PC. Most people would assume that at 85 there's no point but she's obviously fairly computer literate and who knows, she might live another 10 years or more - easily long enough to benefit from a more pleasant computing experience.



    Be aware that if you get an old Mini, the hard drives are very slow in them. If she doesn't have a lot of documents, you be best getting a 64GB SSD, 2-4GB RAM and Snow Leopard and things should be quite speedy.



    The Mini is also a little tricky to open but it's not that bad.
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