You said battery life is a problem?

Vista chews through battery life, I had a cheap laptop with Vista, and couldn't even get 2 hours battery life. I deleted it and installed xubuntu and got over 3 hours.

A Macbook should give you much better battery life than a Dell Vista

I would also say that the Mac OS is much better than Vista, and that it's worth the extra price. The extra Ram you get with the Dell will all be used running the OS, but that's just my opinion obviously

Get a Dell from the small & medium business line and have it shipped with the XP Downgrade option if you don't like Vista.

Whatever you do, don't waste your money on the mac.

I am a software developer as well, and I get all MS software for free. That being said, I pay for Apple's software, because it's worth it.

if you are not planing on playing games, go with the Mac. Aside from gaming, it's better at everything else.

I decided to go with the Dell. Considering I'll be needing to use Office a lot (majoring in economics), and the mac version of Office apparently sucks considerably, I decided that for now, for school, it's best to get the Dell.

Thank you guys for all of your advice! Maybe someday down the road I'll get a mac, we'll have to see.

If you need to game on it go for the dell. If not get the mac. I'm a big fan of macs (I'm posting from one atm).

I had a dell laptop for 3 years and it had to get fixed 15 times. And no I am not exaggerating. I would send away my laptop and they would replace a part and send it back and then I would tell them it still doesn't work and I would send it back to them. This would continue until they fixed the broken part by shear luck.

One time they had to replace the motherboard 3 times because they use refurbished parts and they kept putting broken motherboards into my computer. Why didn't they try turning on the computer before the sent it back to me?

Dell = Epic FAIL!!!!

Also I switched to a Mac Book Pro 6 months ago and love it. My Mom and little brother both have Mac Books and have had no problems. They think screen is big enough. If you decide to get a PC just don't get a dell.

Um yeah....update....

So I finally got a chance to talk to my uncle today on aim, and I asked him about many things, and we talked for hours.

Now I believe I'll go with the Macbook. I can buy a bigger monitor screen for home use if I want a bigger screen, so that'll work out fine. Also I can double boot windows with OS X on it. So if worse comes to worse, I'll be running windows on my mac, but my uncle is 99.999% sure I won't ever have to resort to that. He said that Office works just fine, or I can use Google Doc (which is a really cool thing I never even heard of until he showed me).

Once again thanks for all of your input guys.

Noooooooooo!

No problem enjoy paying another half a G for M$ office.