What is funny is how a lot of people just get caught up in spec wars. I mean that's great for a desktop, what matters then more or less is how much power it has, how good the graphics card is, ect. There are really not many other considerations other then does it overheat.
On the other hand is having a slightly better graphics card (say a 8800GT over a 8600M at 512 MB) worth having a laptop that is a superheated 12 pound brick? A lot of the time when many of you reference a laptop that has these "great specs!" for 1500 dollars or whatever it is, those specs come at a cost both in size, battery life and heat. I have a 15 inch macbook pro, it can run for about 6 hours of normal use (a mix between intensive and non intensive tasks) without having much of a heat problem and weighs about 5-6 pounds. It is also, literally, less then half the width of almost all Dell laptops I've come across.
Now some will say that stuff doesn't matter! I just care about specs! But do you really want to carry around a 10+ pound "super notebook" from one of the many companies that design these commodity machines? Maybe its one of those things people don't fully realize until they carry around their bag with a light mac and then with a heavy Dell.
Now I know you will say "OMG there are light Dells too!" but those aren't the cheap machines you are talking about. The standard high end mac is light and still has good specs. In fact the standard low end mac (macbook) is lighter then a lot of "mobility machines".
There is a lot more to a laptop then just specs, there is design, weight, material quality and a lot more.
Oh and if you are students go to your schools computer store, a lot of them sell them for WELL below retail (like a new macbook pro is 200 off, one of the previous models was 1400 new) since apple gives really solid education discounts. A lot of the time during this time of year they have promotions too such as the 300 dollar Ipod touch free with the purchase of any mac.
As to the OSX vs Vista thing it really is no contest if you have any idea how to use both. OSX crashes far less (almost 0), gets more performance with less (it is SO much less bloated), has a ton of free open source software made for it and has some really good mac only programs if you do video editing, photography, make presentations (keynote is VASTLY superior to powerpoint), make documents (pages is much more effective then word) or basically do anything but pure gaming.
For gaming windows is a little better but that's changing pretty quickly as more and more of the big releases head to OSX with the increased market share. Spore, Call of Duty 4, WoW, Xplane, Sims 2+expansions, Civ 4+expansions, NWN2 ect. I'm switching over less and less to windows even for gaming.
What makes an elitist anyway? Is it someone who makes good decisions or someone who thinks about things in a critical way? I've never really gotten that term, as far as I can tell its a critique stupid people use to make it seem as though other people being smarter then them is a negative instead of a positive (see John McCain being OK and Obama being "elitist" even though McCain has more houses then he can count and Obama never made anywhere near a million dollars as a law professor).
PSN ID: ChosenOne feel free to add me
