Powerbook 15" superdrive or Dell Inspiron 9200

hi, i was wondering if any of you might be able to help me choose on my next laptop.

want to get a laptop to replace my existing dell, which is on it's last legs, and want it for things like work (office applications), music, dvd/cd burning, verty basic video and photo editing, and general internet use. oh, and the odd game (football manager 2005!).

i generally want about 80GB hard drive, although i could go down to 60BG and get an external one i suppose. i want it to be pretty quick, so 512mb ram should do. not sure about processor though. apart from that, i want it to be wireless, although it's not essential to be really portable, as it'll spend msot of its time at home.

basically, i want a pretty good laptop, and can't decide on whether to go for a mac or another pc. i have been offered a very good deal on a new mac (35-40% off...sounds too good to be true, but it is!), however i have never really used them, and i'm quite concerened that i won't get used to it, or will find it very confusing.

on the other hand, i have a friend who helps repair pcs, etc, and is generally pretty handy when it comes to dealing with pcs, and so he can give me lots of software, etc, which he couldn't do with a mac.

i've basically got it down to the above 2 computers, and was wondering what you all thought, and advice?

please help me choose!

 

well, the PowerBook is a very nice notebook and prettier looking and better built than any Dell out there. But then again the Inspiron 9200 hasn't shipped yet so it's hard to tell completely what people think of that.

I think the main dilemma here though is Mac versus PC. All the things you want to do with a computer can be done on a Mac (although I'm not totally sure about Football Manager 2005, you probably know whether or not that's available for Mac), but you should realize there is of course a lot of games that are available for PC only and not Mac. For example, the recent hottest games Doom 3 and Half Life 2 will never be available on the Mac platform (well, not for a very long time). And there's of course certain other software that'll be hard to find for the Mac.

Given the fact you've been using a PC for sometime you'll also have a learning curve with the Mac. I know Apple says it's easier to use, but the truth is if you're new to the platform it's actually going to take you time to figure what's the same and what's not the same between Windows and the Mac OS. So although I like the PowerBook better as a quality built and good looking machine, I think I'd steer you to the 9200 for familiarity of use and software availability. Processor wise anything 1.6 GHz Pentium M or above, 512MB of RAM and a 60GB hard drive (or more if you plan on stashing large amounts of media files) should suit your needs.

 

I just got a 12 inch ibook about a month ago and it's my first foray into mac after being an exclusive pc user for the last 7 years. I agree with abaxter that anything you can do on a mac, you can do on a pc. It's all a matter of whether you have to buy software cuz it is definitely harder to find people who have mac software to share with you. The thing that i do like about mac however, is that os x is foolproof cuz of it's simplicity and i do find there are less things that need to be tinkered with. But looking at the value pc offers compared to mac, it's hard not to go with the dell especially looking at what you want. in the end, i recommend mac. powerbooks are expensive and i believe that people who do purchase them are usually deal with graphic design and so forth but for what you need, powerbooks are overkill. heck, i love them but could not justify it.

 

just to clarify, aspyr is currently in the beta stage of making doom 3 for mac os x. it should be available by feb. 2005.

 

Hi, I recently sold my iBook. Being an advanced Windows user; I found Mac OS X to be extremely different. I couldn't get used to it. See, in Mac OS X the computer controls itself for example (Disk Defragmenter) which runs in the background. You miss out on a lot of useful controls in the Mac platform. I hope this helps!

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