Why I got a Mac.

I've always been a Windows user. At the beginning of this year, I wouldn't even have considered getting a Mac. It all started when someone recommended a Mac to my girlfriend. Since she's not really a power user, she got a MacBook Air and I had the chance to test out OS X. I found it quite easy to use.
When I was choosing a new laptop to buy, I went something like this, "Oh, let's start with the Dell XPS 16. Hmm, I can put a Blu-Ray drive and full HD LCD on it. But wait, if I do that it'll cost around $3000 and I might as well get a desktop, since I'll hardly bring it out. Maybe I should get a 13" laptop instead. Hmm the 13" MacBook looks good. I wonder if it can play games. The GeForce 9400 doesn't look so powerful. How about the XPS 13? That's a bit more powerful and it also has a backlit keyboard. I think I'll get that instead." And this went on for a few weeks. In June, Apple announced the new MacBook Pros at the WWDC. The main changes were the new battery and lower price. So I had another look at the 15" MBP.

XPS 13: 22.55 to 34.34 mm thick, starting weight of 2.2 kg
XPS 16: 24.1 to 33.95 mm thick, starting weight of 2.91 kg
The 15" MBP is 2.41 cm and 2.49 kg. It's as thick as the XPS 16 is at its thinnest point, and thinner than the XPS 13 at some points. It's also quite a lot lighter than the XPS 16. In fact, after looking around, I found that the MBP is the thinnest/lightest 15" laptop with dedicated graphics (there are probably others, but they're not easy to find. Please tell me if you know of any more). This was going to be my third laptop, and I realised that I hardly took my previous 2 outside. I wanted to try a more portable laptop to see if it was useful to have a laptop in school. If such a laptop were powerful enough to run games like BioShock, even better!

So what were my final reasons for getting a MBP?

• thinner
• lighter
• better battery life
• unibody
• multitouch
• better build quality

The 7 hour battery life is seriously way ahead of other laptops. Which other 15" laptop can do it? Sure, some boast 9 or 10 hour battery life, but that's with optional extra batteries and they are only single core, ULV or don't have dedicated graphics. The MBP uses the integrated graphics for extra battery life, but when you need it, you have the power of dedicated graphics. This comes at the cost of a non-removable battery, but how many people buy extra laptop batteries?
I think the unibody design is an engineering marvel. I know there are other aluminium or carbon fibre laptops out there, but the point is this is made out of one piece of aluminium, so it's stronger than pieces put together.
Multitouch is also very useful. The touchpad alone is at least twice as big as other touchpads - I hardly even use a mouse now, except when I play games. Together with multitouch, they put any other laptop pointing solution to shame. Multitouch seems to be copyrighted by Apple though, so I don't know if it'll appear in Windows. I heard Windows 7 has some support for it.

Yeah so looking at the design of the MBP, I found that Apple put in a lot of research and effort, compared to other manufacturers that just put a laptop together for the lowest price possible (that's not necessarily a bad thing). My friend's laptop's HDD died after 1 year 9 months, possibly because he left it on all the time. My cousin's laptop died (I didn't ask how) after around 1 year too and she got a MBP (non-unibody). She said the laptop that died was really bad, so I thought I'd get one with good build quality.

Why get the best 15" MBP? I found that after 2 years, I was wishing that I could upgrade my laptop and I was willing to pay a few hundred dollars. For $450 more, I could get a bigger HDD, faster processor and better video card, so it was a good deal.