“Want to join?The Mac User Group is looking for more members. To obtain information about joining, contact Mary Farmer at www2.whidbey.net/win/index.htm or at 331-1040. The group meets on the third Wednesday of every month in Room 135 at South Whidbey High School.In Nancy Ruff’s house, old Apple Macintosh computers don’t die, nor do they fade away. They just keep on running — forever.Ruff, one of the founding members of the South Whidbey Macintosh User Group, owns two Macintoshes that have passed their 12th year of operation in her home. One, a Mac Plus she used for a dozen years, is now hard at work on her niece’s desk, while a 12-year-old Mac Classic continues to churn out letters and spread sheets in her husband’s home office.He said, ‘It still does what I need it to do,’ Ruff said.In an age when computers become obsolete even before they leave the dealer’s shelf, stories like Ruff’s are rare, except among the Mac devotees who attend Mac User Group meetings. Last week, the 2-year-old group held a Macintosh swap meet, which attracted more than a dozen Mac lovers, their Mac hardware, their Mac software, and their Mac stories.Some of the stuff on sale, like a Mac Laserwriter that Marchella Davenport brought to the group’s meeting room at South Whidbey High School, dates almost to the start of the Mac age back in 1984. Other equipment in the room, like Jill Pearsohn’s tangerine IBook Macintosh – which was not for sale – is at the cutting edge of the Mac culture. But no matter how old the equipment, South Whidbey’s Mac users believe it is all good and still useful.For most group members, their choice to do their word processing, Internet surfing, and other computing on Macs is based in simplicity. Bill Todd, who learned to use computers four years ago and who now owns three Macs, said procedures as simple as dragging a CD into the Mac’s on-screen trash can to eject it give Macs a clear user friendliness advantage over personal computers (PCs) running on the Microsoft Windows operating system.It’s not perfect, Todd said, but between the two, I’d take the Macintosh every time.Group members say the Mac vs. PC argument is not something based purely on taste, like the Coke vs. Pepsi debate. User group member Mary Farmer, a computer repair technician and owner of Freeland’s Maxwelton Computer Solutions, said her preference for Macs lies in how the machines are built and how they operate. She said she likes the fact that she does not have to replace her computer every time new software is introduced on the market, as has been the case historically with PCs. Nor does she have to constantly replace hardware in her Mac.They don’t go bad because of the quality of the parts, she said.Other tech-savvy members of the group give more technical reasons for loving their machines. Karl-Finn Iverson, a former Apple employee who currently works as a computer technician with Farmer, said he likes Macs because they are disease resistant. Currently, there are about 5,000 different computer software viruses that can debilitate a PC. Only 68 such viruses exist that can attack a Mac.But it’s not the technical explanations of Mac superiority that keep these Mac users at their keyboards. For most of them, it is sort of a warm, happy, loving feeling they get when they turn on their machines. Jill Pearsohn’s tangerine Mac is a case in point.It’s orange. It’s a happy color, she said. Ron Pogue, a retired 37-year veteran of the computer-eating Boeing engineering department, said sheer love of the durable Macintosh keeps a few of the machines hanging on at the airplane giant even though it recently signed a contract to replace all its computers with Gateway PCs. Poage said if he was still at Boeing, he would be one of the engineers hiding a Mac in his cubicle.The Macs are so much friendlier, he said.Though the group members value the old Macs and continue to use them, they also keep track of Apple’s newest developments. At the group’s meetings, Farmer gives lectures and demonstrations of Mac hardware and software and gives out the latest info on new processor speeds and new generations of computers. Ruff then puts much of this information into printed form by writing a newsletter for the group.Even though every member of the group swears that the Macintosh is a simple, user-friendly machine, Farmer said things are changing fast in the world of Macs, especially with the introduction of an all-new operating system, the OS X, and the the all-new G4 Macintosh machines.We like to think the Macintoshes are easy, but they have gotten more complex, she said. “