cheeky16

I have to admit many people ihave good points. It does seem that you pay more for the mac hardware than for the pc laptops. Although if you take into account other features of the laptop that are not as obvious and compare them with any PC laptop with the same features you are getting into the same price range. A couple that come to mind right away that I never thought much of when I first bought my macbook pro are the light up keyboard, led screen, and optical audio output. These may not be important to you but being a student myself I find the keyboard extremely useful. The others you may not care much about. The battery life difference between the windows and mac OS is huge, when running windows through bootcamp the laptop got about the same lifetime as any other pc based laptop but when running OSX it was nearly doubled. If you want battery life the macbook pro is great(unless you want multiple batteries, the macbook pro is internal). I'm not trying to be a mac fanboy here I'm just saying I don't think I could go back to a pc based laptop with the advantages I find with the macbook. The office suite for mac isn't the best but it is much more compatible than the iworks suite. I'd get a macbook pro again anyday for school. With my pro mac rant finished I'd like to add I could not live without my windows based pc either. There are some programs which I like to use on the pc that are not available for the mac and I also find that the overall productivity is increased. Mostly for multi tasking and having multiple programs and windows opened. With that said I have a windows based desktop at home running triple monitors, 2x24" and a 19". I personally would not go to a mac desktop. I am pro pc and mac but it depends on your needs and budget. I found my pc laptops didn't last as long either, but my almost 2 year old macbook pro runs like new and hasn't seemed to slow like the windows based ones did.