Although I love Macs and have consistently enjoyed working with Apple products, I have worked on PCs too. I would always maintain that Macs are in a different league to PCs because of the quality of their design and the beautiful utility of the software they run.

But the distinction has begun to blur for me for several reasons, and it now seems time that I should also offer to support PCs when asked to. I have in any case been doing that for years whenever someone local has asked me to, I just haven’t been prepared to journey across Oxfordshire to help someone with a tired looking Dell running Windows 98. I will continue to refuse encounters of that sort, but a reasonably recent PC running a modern OS should not be beneath me when it or its owner has some trouble.

So clearly PC support is now something I should do more of.

Any reluctance I might feel dwindled recently with news of the latest Mac Mini; just for once I would like to see a really aggressively priced Mac, but the time is not yet, it seems. It isn’t just about a so-called entry-level computer. It is also, as I suggested above, about the family’s second or third computer being affordable. And while I have managed to build well kitted-out PCs for my own two children, I can’t afford to buy both of them an iMac, or even a Mac Mini. It is a missed opportunity for Apple because while my own children are at least acquainted with Macs and OS X, most kids are growing up using PCs, with Microsoft Windows, when they could have been introduced to Mac.