Mac vs. Windows: $2000 Laptops Compared

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April 8, 2009, 03:20 PM —  PC World — 

Do you pay dearly for the Apple logo, as Microsoft's Steve Ballmer claims? Or are Apple laptops really a good value, even though they aren't the least expensive models on the market?

To find out, last week I compared the least expensive Apple MacBook, the $999 white model, to two reasonably similar Windows laptops costing about the same amount. My goal was to see what you'd get, in terms of features and specs, if you spent $1000 on a MacBook versus the same amount spent on a Windows machine.

My verdict? The white MacBook's tech specs seem a bit stale in comparison to the two Windows machines I priced online, the HP Pavilion dv3510nr and Dell's Inspiron 13. And your dollar definitely goes further with the Windows laptops.

But what if you're looking for a more powerful laptop and you have $2000 to spend? This week, I compared the features and specs of Apple's low-end MacBook Pro ($1999) to two Windows mobile workstations: the HP Compaq 8510w ($2099), and a Dell Precision M4400 (the unit I configured online was $2013).

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Comments

iLife

James, Although this is an excellant article and one of the most unbiased I have read in a while, I do not believe that iLife really makes that much of a difference. There are plenty of free and/or open source software for Windows, Linux, and OS X that give the same if not better functions then the apps included in iLife.
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