They had a crusty old iBook 14″, the second-to-last model ever released. They had bought a new iMac and almost reported the delivery man to his superiors when he just brought one box — non-laptops come in several boxes, don’t they? They called me to help set it up.
We bought a FireWire cable, dealt with registration, unpacked the few pieces in the package and marvelled at the thin keyboard. The migration took around 40 minutes. Afterwards, everything was lovingly retained, including desktop pictures, AirPort settings and application preferences. The migrated Entourage 2004 thoroughly outdone its older copy even when emulated in Rosetta, although this may be attributed to the general sogginess of the iBook.
Safari was snappy. Really, really snappy — snappier than IE on Windows on their work PC. Front Row and that odd remote was convincingly magical and wonderful. The whole machine worked like it didn’t need the extra RAM they had been meaning to get for it. I told them about Time Machine and about plugging in a hard drive and clicking a button, and about automatic backups for the rest of the machine’s life, and their eyes lit up. “We’re getting one of those,” they said.
Macs have their faults and omissions, but it’s still hard not to see how this sort of computer upgrade experience could be compelling. This may be one of the rarely-realized “everything clicked” scenarios, but it’s the only one I’ve heard of from personal experience, and it’s not for a lack of trying.