In the comments to Dwight Silverman's guide to buying a laptop on a budget, one commenter said...
...or you can just buy a Mac.
A response:
You do know that a Mac won't give you the same options and customizability as you can get with other PCs, right? Nor does it run Windows by default.
I am guessing this writer meant to make that sound like a bad thing. Perhaps it could be if you're the type who likes to tinker with hardware, build your own machines and things like that. And I can see the appeal in that sort of endeavor, but when you get right down to actually using the machine, in my experience the Macintosh will do everything a Windows computer will -- or at least everything I need a Windows computer to do. Don't know if I could play Counterstrike on it (thanks for that, Tam), but since I've never been a gamer that's not a concern for me. I have the MS Office Suite on my Mac with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage and have used Word and Excel in their intended environments and they've all done what I need them to do. I don't know about QuickBooks or other software like that, but it wouldn't surprise me if they had or were working on Mac versions for that. Yep, the Macs are more expensive, but that's just what happens when you're dealing with proprietary hardware and software. Even so, when I was music shopping at Best Buy last week I saw the 13-inch MacBook with the 2.13GHz Intel processor, 2GB of double-data-rate memory and a 160GB hard drive for $999. Seems like a bargain to me even at that price. YMMV, and often does, of course...but I'll probably never go back to Windows if I can help it.
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