I'll preface this by saying I will not get into a religious argument.
However, many people who seriously compare equivalent hardware believe
that macs are competitively priced with name-brand Windows machines.
It's certainly true that you can get a lower-end PC for a lot less than you can
get the cheapest mac for, and you may not want all the extra hardware
features and name-brand quality that come bundled in a macbook. But apples-to-apples
(the pun is irresistible) mac hardware is not really much more expensive.
If you might consider a mac, and want the second part of your question
answered: The macbook pro adds value in compute-intensive tasks, and
most particularly graphics, like games and video editing. Unless you're
doing it all day long, the difference for still photo editing probably isn't
worth the added cost. Here's a very informed and fairly detailed comparison
based on the newest macbooks, which have caught up somewhat with the
macbook pros. at least for the time being:
In black and white: a review of the Santa Rosa MacBook: Page 1
One other thought: If you go mac, skip Office, at least to start. Neooffice is
a mac-customized version of Open Office - free, and very, very, compatible
with Office for word and excel use except for the ultimate power users.
You can always buy Office for mac later if Neooffice doesn't measure up,
but I'll bet it will.
As for a good reason to go Mac - how about Windows? That's enough for me.
Again, there are thousands of mac vs windows fights on the internet every
day, and I won't get into one. I just wanted to challenge what I believe is
an incorrect statement about hardware cost that everyone was nodding their
head over, and point to the macbook vs macbook pro info you asked for.
