Today I finally had to pull the trigger to purchase a new PC laptop for my Mom. Her laptop is so old — “How old is it?” — It’s so old that my new iPhone 3G S literally has more RAM than her computer does and nearly the same size HDD. The whole experience was truly depressing. I really don’t want to be the quintessential Apple fanboy, but I’m left with little choice in the matter. I’ve only been a Mac user for 18 months or so, but that’s really all I need to stake my claim. Picking which “cheap” new PC I was sentencing my mother to was like being forced to catch a cold, but you get to choose which one. Would you rather:

1. Feel pretty decent but deal with a runny nose and a headache all day? Or,
2. Feel absolutely fine, but then out of nowhere totally lose your lunch?

Dramatic I know, but to get something respectable, you need to spend close to $800 and then you’re close enough to Mac territory and you may as well Man/Woman up! My only constraint was a 15″ monitor a good reputation. First parts easy enough, the second was another story.

I argued valiantly for Mom to buy a Refurbished Unibody Macbook for the smoking hot price of $950, which sounded like robbery to her. I told her it was indeed robbery; she was robbing Apple with that terrific price. The deciding point was that her Real Estate Network in her area can’t be accessed from anything but IE. Mom, sadly doesn’t have interest in running a virtual machine on her shiny new Mac, so I surrendered.

At the end of the day, I made a decision. Don’t ask what the choice was because it’s really not that interesting. It’ll work marginally well for her, after she purchases Anti-Virus software and figures out how not to have it scan every time she’s doing anything at all. Moving on…