A geek friend who's into Linux asked my advice for getting a mac for his mother-in-law knowing that he'd have to do remote support for it. He found my response useful so I thought I'd blog it.
The computer will mostly be used for email and web surfing.
If she wants a desktop get an iMac. EIther of the 20" models is sufficient, though the 2.4GHz 20" model is worth the added cost for what you get, she probably won't need the added specs. The Mac Mini is fine too if she already has a monitor but it's not quite the deal it was when it first came out. The camera builtin to the iMac is really nice to do video chats.
I really like laptops instead of desktops and recommend macbooks. I like being able to move the machine to different rooms, e.g., bring it into the kitchen to follow a recipe without having to print it out. Again the middle model is the sweet spot, but the low end will be fine. A lot of people do like the black one and while you can configure the white one the same way the black costs $150 more. My sister got the macbook pro because she liked the bigger screen (15.4" vs 13.3". It's a lot more money but she's happy with it. The current guess is new macbooks and macbook pros will be announced at the end of Feb.
I think all of these ship with with 1GB ram and that's probably good enough for email and surfing. I have 1GB in my Powerbook now, it's fine but can get a little tight with a lot of things open. I typically have running: Quicksilver, iGTD, Safari, NetNewsWire, MarsEdit (blogging client), Mail, Adium (IM client), iCal, Address Book, Activity Monitor. I can have one or two other large apps (iTunes, iPhoto, Delicious Library, Pages) open before running into some swapping.
My sister forgets to close apps so sometimes runs into problems (the little red button in a window's top corner on a mac closes a document not the app, unlike on windows). Also we've setup a second account for her fiance and both are logged in at the same time. The virtual memory works great but some of the apps like safari (and the flash plugin) are VM hogs.
Apple gouges on memory but if you need to repair it they don't respond well if there's third party mem installed. I'll probably get 2GB of Apple ram and if I wanted more than that I'd go 3rd party. The iMac comes with a 1GB DIMM so adding another is easy. The macbook comes with 2 512MB DIMMS so if you go to 2 1GB ones, ask for the old ones back to sell on ebay, otherwise the Apple Store will keep them and you're still paying for them. Ordering online doesn't have this problem.
Backups may or may not be an issue. A lot of people now just use web apps, my sister, when she remembers, backs up a few files to a thumb drive. I have an external drive I connect every few weeks and use a free program SilverKeeper to dupe the drive. I've restored from this once and it was fine. Leopard's Time Machine is a good seemless backup tool. I haven't used it yet but a friend loves it. It needs another drive to backup to, but they have a new product Time Capsule to do that. It a combo AirPort (802.11n/g/b) basestation and hard drive and can do backups over wifi. It's about to ship but I plan on getting one with the new machine.
Some wifi routers don't do as well with macs. Sometimes the web interface doesn't like safari or configuring the password for encryption is wierd (wanting a key instead of a passphrase) or more likely the port forwarding stuff doesn't auto configure for audio/video chats. Linksys is the best of the 3rd parties. For my sister we got her an Apple one which while expensive, it works well. It's also a print server so she plugs in her printer and it's on the network, great with the laptop. The admin UI is not web based so it's nice to use. I've taught her how to reboot it which she needs to do occasionally (if the printer isn't visible), it's no problem. Time Capsule lets you plug in a printer too so it's all you need and comes in 500GB and 1TB models.
If she's into it, Apple has a service called One-to-One. For $99 for a year, she can book an hour-long one-on-one instore training session to cover anything about the mac or apple products. How to use Safari, bookmarks, mail, iPhoto, an iPod, etc. The amazing thing is that $99 allows for up to one a week in the year, that's 52 sessions. They have iMacs instore to use or she can bring her own laptop to use. This can free you up from having to do support/training.
OS X comes with a Software Update tool that runs weekly and gets new revs from Apple. It works great. My sister can do it and when I see her I do quick checks to see that all her stuff is up to date. My sister is now up to iTunes and iPhoto so people do learn to use new things. If she needs Word/Excel support, get the student edition of mac Office, either the new or old is fine. There are no checks or limitations.
Safari is fine and I use it as does my sister. Firefox is installed too for the occasional sites that don't render in Safari. I've taught my sister how to start it if a site doesn't work. Safari is more mac-like (emacs keybindings, dictionary lookup, etc) but your mother-in-law probably won't run into those things. The fact that it updates via Software Update is nice. Firefox 3 will use cocoa so I'm looking forward to that, but the new WebKit builds (Safari's open source HTML rendering engine based on KHTML) are blazingly fast.
AppleCare is their hardware warranty and I'll get it with the next machine. It's like $350 but covers all apple stuff and makes repairs and phone support pretty painless for 3 years. Bringing things to an apple store (you can schedule an appointment time online) for easy stuff is much nicer than dealing with say Dell. Their genius bars are a huge win compared to the Windows and Linux world or Best Buy's Geek Squads. Apple machines are probably average when it comes to needing repairs. I had a bad mem slot once and a hard disk that died. Both were diagnosed at a genius bar. For the mem slot I shipped to Apple and had a new machine back in a couple of days, for the drive I left it at the apple store and picked it up in a couple of days (now I'd change the drive myself).
I know it's not popular but the good book to get is Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual. It has a chapter on everything from the basics to editing video with iMovie, etc. I learned a bunch from the Tiger edition. My sister hasn't open it, intimidated by the size, but I'm still hoping.
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