Well, on the surface, this doesn't appear to have anything to do with ham 
radio but it does.  I've been sitting around, off and on, for weeks, maybe 
even months, trying to figure out what I was going to do about a computer. 
This one is 13 years old, has parts scrounged from other computers, served 4 
power supplies, runs 4 gigs of mismatched RAM, burned up I don't know how 
many fans, uses a pair of 500 GB drives, the second one for backup, and if 
it wasn't for a computer geek friend I've had for 20 years, it wouldn't even 
be running at all.  My wife and I have been using talking cell phones for 
years and jumped to the iPhones when the I4 came out.  I never thought I'd 
like a touch screen but I took to it, at my advanced age, like duck to 
water.  We've each upgraded as each iPhone came out and frankly, I was one 
step away from going strictly iPhone access if my windows computer died. 
Plus, my wife and I are both retired, living on social security, and buying 
upgrades for jaws just has finally come to an end.  Plus, I'm still using XP 
and have been complaining I'd have to start learning windows all over again 
to upgrade to a new windows machine.  My wife jumped in with both feet a 
year ago and we bought her the Mac Ayr.  Within weeks, she has learned 
enough to turn off her windows machine, which is on its last leg anyhow, and 
she strictly uses the Mac Ayr and pays all our bills, orders our groceries 
from WalMart, does all her emails, and synchronizes her Mac Ayr with her 
iPad and iPhone.  Today I discovered the book from National Braille Press 
called Everything You Wanted To Know About Macs or something like that. 
Reading through the table of contents gave me hope I would have a reference 
to walk me through changing to a Mac computer.  So, I logged on to Best Buy, 
it's only a mile away, and logged on to Apple.com for more information about 
the MacMini and when I saw I could get 4 Gigs of RAM, what I'm running now, 
and a 500 Gig hard drive for 480 dollars, I started thinking twice.  Next 
week, I'm going over an between now and then, I'll decide on the 500 GB 
model or the 8 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage, plus a wireless keyboard. 
Before then, I'll start reading the book from NBP I mentioned and pumping my 
wife for what she knows since she taught me most of what I know about my 
iPhone in the first place.  I've already considered a couple of ham programs 
that may not be available for Macs and also Gold Wave for my sound editor 
but I'm sure that won't be too difficult to replace.  I've gotten rather 
addicted to using apps of all kinds so having all those plus, my iTune 
music, and everything else sinc with the MacMini will be very nice.  Then 
there is iCloud for auto backup which I already use for my iPhone. 
Additionally, I have gotten hooked on listening to Alex for a voice 
synthesizer and the other voices, including Eloquence and the human quality 
voices, just aren't cutting it with me and my hearing loss these days.  Alex 
works great and of course there are no more jaws upgrades for a couple of 
hundred bucks a pop since Mac upgrades are free.  So, if any of you Mac hams 
out there have any suggestions, I'd like to hear it relating to ham software 
or whatever is appropriate.  Oh, one more thing.  Dragon Dictate for 150 
dollars really turns me on so I'm planning on getting it, too.  My office 
desk sure is going to like all that extra space with that tiny little box 
they call a MacMini.

Phil.
K0NX