[buzzzed.com]

I'm a college student fixin to get a notebook. I'd been a long time fan of PCs but I've come to a point where if my HD crashes one more time I'm going to tie the damn thing to my truck and drive off with the thing. I started to look into macs because they definately are more reliable, they remind me of german-engineered cars, everything just works. Plus their av capabilities definately stand out, I'm goin to school for Music Production Technology

Now heres what I want the notebook to be able to do
1. Handle basic word processing jobs, web browsing, power point (or mac equivalent) effectively w/o slowdowns or crashes
2. Play Doom III(not big priority but would be nice), World of Warcraft, And any other demanding apps
3. Play all my mpegs, mp3s, movs etc.

The Intel Core-duo caught my eye, I'm in love with the thing. And for $1699USD refurbished at the apple store, it may be the way I want to go.

Although some of these jobs can be handled by my PC, so mabe an Ibook or Powerbook would be more practical, although I would need to upgrade my PC to play Doom III.

I could afford the $1699 but I'd rather spend $1000-1200 and have more money to spend on other things. How much better off am I with the Intel Core-Duo as oppose to the Power PC, and what are my options for upgrading with both?

[stew]

What software will you be using for school? Many music applications haven't been ported to Intel yet, and they are simply unusable under emulation. If you need a machine to run Max/MSP or ProTools right away instead of in two years, you'd be much better off with a G4 PowerBook, or an iBook if you don't mind the fewer pixels. Or you could install Windows XP on the MacBook, but that would defeat the whole point of getting a Mac to begin with.

As for hard drive failures, Macs are not immune there either. They use the exact same hard drives as PC laptops.

[mduell]

You may want to wait for the new small Intel-based portable; rumored to be a 13" widescreen.

For both, the only upgrade options are RAM, disk, and possibly wifi; CPU, GPU, VRAM, etc. are fixed for the life of the machine.