Well,
I'm rooting for the macbook. It's not that much more expensive when compared to a windoes laptop features wise.
My personal choice would be for a 15" macbook pro. 17's a little too big, and a hate the small shiny screen on the macbooks. The way the keyboard lights up in low light conditions is particularly nice.
Thereis a <rant> in here somewhere, but i'm not quite sure where to put it..
Getting the mac to run XP (stay the hell away from vista) and your fave windows games isn't that much of a problem, you can either use apple's boot camp to allow you to install and boot into windows, or something like parallels desktop, which takes advantage of the vt features in the intel chip to run osx and xp side by side.
Both options allow for 3d acceleration, gaming at native speeds. Right mouse button on the mac is achieved either by pressing ctrl-click, or by plugging in a standard usb wheelmouse. Parallels is a little extra, but even the premium edition is less than 100 US dollars.
Code: Select all
http://www.parallels.com/en/products/desktop/screens&demos/
Particularly nice is the parallels coherence mode, whereby xp and osx applications can be worked at the same time and displayed together, integrated into the main osx desktop environment.
Of course, to run xp and osx side by side, you'll want memory. best bet here is to order the laptop with stock/minimum ram, and then purchase your ram elsewhere to take it up to 4GB. Last time I checked, apple's memory pricing wasn't exactly competitive.
For word processing, layout, and general work-things, my experience is that the mac will allow a much more trouble free existence, and you'll be able to spend less time faffing around fighting with the operating system, and more time working.
The spotlight system on mac, accessed through command-space will maintain an index of your files, emails, applications and contacts and let you find things based on matched keywords or sentences. Your home directory can even be encrypted, apple provides a tool called filevault with OSX to this end.
As Fifer says, virus exposure and spyware is much improved on the mac. To all intents, there's nothing to worry about. Still, i'd err on the side of caution and run virex or clamXav as a minimum.
You can still be stupid on a mac - if you download an application from the internet or get it in email, and double-click to run it, using your admin password to grant extra privileges, don't blame apple if it turns out to do something other than wot it says on the tin - it could go around changing, hiding or deleting files. Know where your software comes from is all I'm saying.
Generally osx has loads of nice touches, in addition to being quite pretty, it's still fast, not nearly as drm encumbered as vista (don't go there). exposé and dashboard (both standard) make for a really slick alternative to window management and alt-tab application switching.
Proper, usable multilanguage support is included, giving easy access to various sorts of arabic, cryllic, roman, chinese, and japanese script.
The system tends not to need restarting unless a system update is needed. It'll alert you every so often as apple releases updates, kind of like windows update does. In day to day use, the laptop can be slept or hibernated. Wake from sleep is achieved within seconds usually, while hibernation can take a little longer to recover from.
</rant>
right.. i'm bowing out of this debate now.. make the right choice eh?
XW