Valhalla Island

Yesterday my family picked up two new computers — an iMac desktop and a Toshiba notebook. I wasn’t going to go into why we didn’t also get a Mac laptop but I think it’s important to the story.

The laptop is Mum’s secondary work computer for use when she’s on the road. The iMac is an upgrade and replacement for my Macbook, which gets passed down to my sister.

We originally planned to get a Macbook Pro as my Mum’s laptop but she’s a bookkeeper and while some modules of the software she uses are also released for OS X, other important modules like Accounting Pro are not. On top of that, it’s not a common filetype between the Mac and PC versions of MYOB. This is slack on MYOB’s part, no worries though, Windows runs on Macs now. But as Mum uses this software almost 100% of the time, beyond great hardware there’s no advantage to buying a Mac over a PC.

Now, this would also be fine if Mum was happy with a 13″ screen. There is no “Apple premium” on Macbooks (not including the black one) anymore. We could have bought a Macbook, enjoyed it’s great hardware, run Windows the huge majority of the time and always have OS X there if we wanted. But Mum thought 13″ was too small. This also wouldn’t be a problem either if there wasn’t a $1300 gap between 13″ and 15″ Mac laptops. That’s when Mac laptops stop being good value, especially when you’re not going to be using OS X.

Mum loves the 15″ Macbook Pro but we both decided it’s just not worth it.

We head to the every man’s computer store and are faced with 1000 slightly different but all ugly computers. We settle on a Toshiba with around the same specs as a Macbook but with a 15″ screen, it’s $1500 and isn’t the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen. It suits Mum’s needs perfectly and it’s half the price of the Macbook Pro. Great.

I was very keen for Mum to switch to Mac so I could retire from my job as personal tech support for my Mum’s business. I was sick of dealing with ridiculous things like viruses and the pain of setting up backups on her PC. Our wireless at home has never been protected because I’ve never been able to connect to our own password protected WiFi on the house PCs.

That’s the prelude, now, to the point.

“How do I connect to the internet on this?” asks Mum at the new laptop.

I spend half-a-frustrating-hour trying to get it to even see our open wireless network. Navigating through a thousand menus and wizards that have way too much text in them. There’s no WiFi icon in the taskbar, it doesn’t tell me WiFi is off, just says it can’t find any networks but doesn’t appear to be searching. I’m asked if it was really me that clicked that button after every button click. Then I’m reminded that PC laptops sometimes have a WiFi function key and I find the WiFi icon, F8, I press it and it tells me WiFi is off, I press it again, it tells me WiFi is off.

The button is there but it seems to just be an off button, not a toggle. Extremely frustrating. I pick up the computer ready to throw it against the wall and wow, would you look at that, hidden under the front recess almost on the bottom of the computer, surrounded by nothing else is a tiny switch with a tiny fucking WiFi icon on it. I flick it on, find our network and connect. Sweat running down the popping veins on my forehead, I take a deep breath and walk away.

This is a perfect example of exactly the kind of unbelievable bullshit you have to deal with when using a PC.

First of all, why is there a hardware switch for turning WiFi on and off? Secondly, why are there two switches for doing this, one that doesn’t work? Thirdly, why is Wifi OFF by default? Why would you want to turn WiFi off anyway and is there anyone in the world that turns it on and off so often they need the convenience of a hardware switch? If you do for whatever reason want to turn it off, it can be done in software anyway. This is the kind of thing that sends me insane.

For comparison. Later that night I set up the iMac. One of the 4 or 5 steps in the installation procedure was “Do you want to connect to this open network?” I clicked yes. Two minutes later, after the OS had started up, I opened a browser and had an internet connection.