It has been about a month for my father switched his computer from Windows environment to Mac’s. Knowing he would never be encouraged to do it by himself, somehow it’s been forced by me, disguised as presenting him a gift of Macbook Air 13″. Many of us were growing up with computers as joyfully given gifts from our parents, and reciprocating their love with same joy was one of my recent happy memory.
Like so many of his age group in Korea, my father couldn’t have a right opportunity to get acquainted with modern digital technologies. Also for being a white-collar government official who had to deal more with political or human issues, he couldn’t have enough time to train his hand to type effectively on a keyboard, to learn about how to exercise his ownership over his machine.
After his retirement, occasionally he had to learn more about how to control his computer in a different level. He had to learn how to type a document, save it as a file, send it via email, sync his iPhone, etc. What mostly had been helped by his secretary whom he had when he held his office in the government, should be handled by himself nowadays. It has not been too bad to do normal activities under normal circumstances.
But what could he do when bad things happen? Should he keep purchasing virus cleaners? How could he fix the situations like losing his important files? And unfortunately, it did happen to him. Being forced to take an effort to free his Windows from malware grasp, he had to erase the system, losing his files.
Anyone may encounter bad situation like this from any types of computers. But I can’t still accept that such defeat had to happen like this easily. And why is it always Windows? Being a professional with conviction, being his son, I had to rescue my father from Windows hell.
So far his conversion experienced almost no difficulty. Once realized his web-based activities are not changed at all, he felt enough confidence in using Mac. As expected, system-based activities like finding a file or deleting an application were much easier to learn than Windows. There is one challenge caused by being a user of Korean banking systems, which requires Windows’ Internet Explorer with ActiveX. By helping him to acquainted with virtualization application like Parallels, my father were able to use Windows inside Mac only for a limited time.
Though my goal to free him from Windows had to be compromised, minimizing his exposure to dangerous world could be suffice at least for a while. After all, my father were never more happier to have truly his own computer which makes him proud. My father began to understand why it means to be like owning a BMW, when you own a Mac.
Being a Mac user for five years myself, I couldn’t help but to believe that if anyone has to choose a system for his or her digital livelihood, it should be Mac for safer and less irritating experiences. Maybe I’m a little biased, but I think it’s quite difficult to judge millions of happy users for 30 years to be wrong.
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