Also you get a discount for being a student. I believe it was around 15% off of every purchase. It's a nice little gift back.

The black Macbook is $1359 with the discount, but that's without the OS and other features. I didn't add the price of those on yet. I'll most likely be buying it at BestBuy, unless they don't give me the student discount. If online is cheaper I'll go that route.

Get Open Office with your Mac, it has all the features and file extensions of Microsoft Office but it's free.

hahahah are you kidding me? you just compared an intel Intel gma x3100 to the nvidia geforce 8400m video card. You my friend know jack crap about video cards. that's 144mb of shared memory on an intergrated video card.

gheez...talk about cherry picking

Does it translate directly? I won't have to do any conversions if I send via email?

Also I might just stick with MS Office. If my teachers want me to pull up excel and do some crazy stuff, I might get extremely lost if I don't have an excel program that worked exactly like the one the teacher was explaining.

If you're talking about Open Office then no, there's no conversions needed that I know of.  The layout is pretty much the same as Microsoft Office and includes the same extensions as well.  If you want to give it a try here's the website.

Yeah that's what I was talking about, and thanks for the link. I'll check it out later, right now it's 1am and I'm heading off to bed. Freakin tired, and I have a big day of celebration in front of me.

I just saw that it's dedicated memory on the Nvidia. The info was misleading (I read shared memory, but the path I went didn't give me an option for video cards). I also see there is an option for the exact same video card that's in the Mac for $100 less. SO that's puts the Mac at $85 more then the Dell.

Still very close. I also could not find where the Dell has a built in webcam, although the image looks like it does. The Mac also has the magnetic power... magnetic closures, and OSX blows anything MS has ever made away.

I am typing this on my PC at the moment, running Vista. I just got done with a session of Crysis, and checked this site. I usually do it on my Mac Book Pro. I am a Microsoft Developer, so I am not some Mac fanboy that has no clue.

Good choice on the Mac wfz, you won't be disapointed!

Go here:

http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php

It's open office for the Mac. :)

I don't know if it's the same in the States, but here in the UK, you can get a better specced Dell for half the price of a Macbook Pro, never mind the standard MacBook.

Macs use exactly the same components as regular PCs (they're built by AsusTech in Taiwan), but they're overpriced, run extremely hot and have far less native software available for them, especially games. Unless you have a particular need for a Mac (graphic design maybe) or find OSX compelling, then there's no real point in spending so much extra on one. Personally, I find Vista to be a far more intuitive and functional OS than OSX, but your mileage may vary.

A mac with windows and a PC of equal spec with windows will run everything at exactly the same speed...