I use both and honestly, I haven't taken the Hackintosh out of the laptop bag in months. We have one Mac at work and for something that's supposed to be intuitive to use, the IT guys seem to have a hard time figuring it out. One guy told me it took him 20 mins to try and map a network drive before he gave up and just created a shortcut instead.

Not bashing Macs, but don't you think that the info on the official site might be a bit biased...?

i've owned my dell laptop since summer of 2006. luckily it came with 3 years of warranty:

-battery warrantied (didn't hold a charge for longer than an hour after a few months)
-cdrom warrantied (stopped reading, was replaced with a refurb'd drive)
-videocard warrantied (got fried, so they replaced my motherboard too)

this laptop was acting up earlier too. the support rep diagnosed my videocard as being fried again and would have the motherboard replaced + they'd give me a monitor (even though my warranty just expired). however, for whatever fing reason, it's fine now, so i'll cancel the service request.

whatever you do, buy as much warranty coverage as you can. oh and dell.. ha ha.. oh never again.

The discount's already out for students. Go to apple.ca.

If you want specs and a better deal, get a Dell.
If you don't care about specs (and not everyone does) but like Apple's intangibles, get a MacBook Pro. Try it out and decide for yourself.

They both do the job. They are both good laptops. It comes down to what you want more.

If you weren't a student, I'd tell you not to get a MacBook unless you had a purpose for it or you really like it. But with the student deal, the difference is not so bad.

have you played with OSX yet? it's not a premium that's worthwhile to you if you're just throwing windows on it. I enjoy having both

Also try looking at the 14v. It has no CD Drive but it's portable:

http://www1.ca.dell.com/ca/en/home/L...=cadhs1&~ck=mn

If you're not a gamer then i'd suggest the macbook, lighter more reliable, can dual boot with bootcamp if you really want to. OSX is better for working for me with the toggle functions etc.

Yeah a lot of people say its better for school etc, theres really no official reasoning for that. Runs a little smoother and i like the workflow better for doing work thats about it. Then again I cant play any of my games on osx and the msn sucks for osx so I end up being more productive when im on my macbook.

If i was on a budget then I would gladly get a dell, its a solid laptop that works. But it feels somewhat plastic and toy-like to me. If you can afford it then I'd say get the mac, more aesthetically pleasing to look at (visually & OS), and more reliable.

For Dell, I wouldn't get one unless it was a Latitude. My boss went through 2 XPS's in 2 years, a M2010 and M1730... both felt cheap and constantly broke down. The Latitudes rarely ever have issues, usually it's because someone dropped theirs. Come to think of it, it doesn't just apply to Dell, I wouldn't buy a laptop unless it was a business class laptop like a Thinkpad or Latitude.

Macs are just too simple for us IT guys. In Windows, there's 3+ ways of getting anything done. On the Mac, it's basically 1 or 2 ways max. My embarrassing Mac story is when I brought home a G5 tower. It took me 15 min to figure out how to open the cd tray, which turned out to be an eject button on the top-right of the keyboard. :P

Mac.

my lattitude's got wicked probs!

Hey, everyone makes a lemon here and there. All I know is out of the 500+ Latitudes deployed in the company, maybe 5% actually have problems that I have to call Dell to fix. I dunno what kind of warranty you have with Dell but if I have to call them twice for the same laptop, they replace it with a new one the third time around.

As far as I know, the IT people don't like Macs because they're difficult to troubleshoot.

+1 and with MAC mail for some reason it takes up to 30mins or more for it to connect the mail servers O_O

ULIC USES DELL and also recommends that you get the complete care warranty.

if you're 4 then you're a pc

I picked up a 13" macbook pro 2.0GHz c2duo, 2GB ram + ipod touch rebated for students yesterday! I just sold that ipod touch for $200 today.

(1399 -100) + 259 + tax = 1745
1745 - 259 - 200 = 1286 => 1148 before tax

The Dell M1330 XPS sells for 1099 with slightly better specs. But I already have a desktop, so I went for the Mac. Plus there's some stuff for school I can do with the Mac.

They also have $100 off a canon printer with a MacBook purchase, so you can sell that on CL too if ur hard core.

So i bought it.
13" macbook pro 4gb ram, 250gb hd + ipod touch


^^did you end up getting the 3 year extended warranty???

can anyone recommend anything that i can download and install? Things that i may need?

Do i need to install the cds that it came with? like the "applications install dvd"?

No.

And those CDs are for backup only.

yah...every application that you somewhat need is already installed...i recomment iwork if you can get a copy for cheap...don't bother with win via bootcamp...i hardly ever use mine

Hopefully someone can help me out with this, because Im in the same situation, just for getting a laptop for school. Id prefer a Mac because of just preference.

But is the IPod Touch the only student discount that you can get? What does Dell or HP offer in terms of University discounts?

thinking about buying a macbook ... but i'm thinking they will come out with some better version next year like they always do... damn it!

Dell usually has contracts with schools for better discounts, check your local university...