Allow me to give my opinion as somebody who always buys the minimum hardware necessary to barely get by (that is: web browsing, MS Office, maybe running Cygwin

Allow me to give my opinion as somebody who always buys the minimum hardware necessary to barely get by (that is: web browsing, MS Office, maybe running Cygwin and/or compiling a Java program now and then). I bought my Macbook last year when Vista was just coming out. Had it been 3 months before, I would have bought an XP machine, no doubt about it. You can run XP fine on 1/2 GB RAM, which is what I have on my home desktop PC. And, for me, it was a known quantity. What the heck, I ran Windows ME on my desktop PC for like 6 years before I upgraded to an XP machine. And that was because I got the idea of playing with MIDI and audio sequencing. However, at the time of the Vista release, the consensus seemed to be that 1/2 GB RAM wasn't going to cut it. And at that time, the price difference between a Mac and a PC with 1 GB RAM was more like $200-$300. And with a Vista machine you would then have to buy an antivirus, firewall, etc, maybe even a program for playing DVD's. And who knows if Vista wasn't going to need 2GB anyway. So I went with the Mac. Today's situation looks quite different. The $500 Dell has 1GB RAM, which seems to be enough to run Vista tolerably. So, today I would probably have a hard time justifying buying the Mac. I could try (Unix underneath, no viruses, dev tools included) but I don't know if the wife would buy it :-) Yes, I am ignoring details such as CPU and front bus speeds, web cam, etc. But as I said, my position is to buy the minimum HW to get by. (BTW I haven't used Vista yet, and to be honest I'm not looking forward to it.)