Originally Posted by
tfar
You are splitting hairs. And you know it.
that's not at all what i'm doing.
Video is "somewhat slower" if at all.
there's quite a bit of a difference between an intel gma 4500mhd and an nvidia 9400m, particularly with gpu aware apps. os x itself and quite a few apps, including photoshop cs4, take full advantage of the gpu and a better video chip will make a
huge difference in performance.
http://techztalk.com/techwebsite/10-...-graphics-card
"In test done with benchmarking tool 3D Mark Vantage, NVIDIA 9400M offered five-fold performance gain over Intel’s GMA 4500MHD graphics chipset."
Same goes for chip. 2Ghz vs. 2.13GHz, firewire is of marginal utility at best unless you transfer from a video cam. The Macbook has FW 400 which isn't faster than USB 2.0, either. I'd rather have an HDMI out.
the cpu speed is a wash but the memory bus is faster on the macbook (1066 v. 800) along with a 3 meg cache instead of 1 meg. firewire 400 is definitely faster than usb 2 and it also provides enough power to actually spin up a hard drive rather than relying on overspec-ed usb ports or dual usb cables to get more than usb's limit of 500ma per port. in fact, firewire can bus power two laptop drives from the same port. the $479 model only has vga, not hdmi, while the $699 model has hdmi but oddly lacks gigabit ethernet which the $479 model has.
But a bigger screen, twice the Ram and twice the disk space for hundreds of dollars less is not splitting hairs. The specs of these machines make them clearly superior overall and much more so when price/value is factored in.
the screen size is an inch bigger but it has exactly the same number of pixels, 1280 x 800, so there's no real difference in actual use. it does come with more memory but that's easy to add, as is swapping the hard drive should it fill up.
overall, it's a less capable machine with a couple of things that spec better than the macbook. in real world use it will be noticeably slower which is why it costs less.