I’ve been keeping an eye on Apple notebooks for quite a while. While I currently have a 17” Dell XPS Gen 2 gaming laptop, I find myself using it more for web surfing and software development than I ever do gaming. When you talk about the performance and size of notebooks, the small MacBook and MacBook Pro jump to the front of the pack.

Nothing that Dell offers is as thin as the MacBook line of notebooks.

With the upgrades from Intel coming soon, I’m thinking when the platform reaches the following level I’ll make the change.

  • Santa Rosa Platform (DDR2-800)

  • 4 GB RAM

  • LED Backlight on a 15.4” display with at least 1440x900 resolution

  • Hybrid Flash Disk Drive

  • Dedicated Graphics Card (nVidia 8400 or something similar)

  • Leopard and Boot Camp

  • 2.4 GHz+ Core 2 Duo with 4MB Cache

That would be enough of an upgrade to convince me to switch to the MacBook Pro. I would of course run Windows on it (hopefully 64-bit Vista by that time, if it is ready) most of the time.

So why buy a MacBook to run Windows? Because nobody else makes a 1” thick, slick looking notebook with the support network of Apple.