I am fairly new to Mac. I have only had my Macbook Pro for about 2 months. There are a number of things evident to me though. OS X is a much better operating system than Windows XP or even Vista, although I do see that Vista is basically moving in the direction of OS X. With the Intel based Macs, you can now have the best of both worlds because you can either set up a dual boot to Windows or run Windows inside a virtual machine under OS X. You can't do it the other way around. Since I do a lot of Unix, having OS X running unix underneath is a big plus. For me, Mac is just a lot more polished. The only application I am having an issue with is Visio, but I do know that I can run it using one of the two methods I detailed above since it is Windows only. If I were buying a new laptop, the decision wouldn't be whether to get the Mac or the PC, rather it would be which Mac to get. I use EVDO, so it pretty much has to be the MacBook Pro 15". I need it for the card slot to take the EVDO card (note: not a PCMCIA card). MacBook Pro takes the Expresscard/34 instead. Otherwise, I think I would have gone for one of the black MacBooks for the smaller size.