Who says that Macs are significantly more expensive than their PC counterparts? Compare the high-end MacBook Pro which has almost the exact same specs as these Dell XPS laptops. Granted, the Macs have video chipsets that aren't quite as powerful, and slightly slower hard drives, but they cost a few hundred dollars less and have dual core intel processors. I'd definitely rather have a dual core processor over a faster video chipset in my laptop. Bringing the high-end MacBook Pro up to a 7200RPM hard drive adds one hundred dollars to the price tag for a total cost of two thousand, five hundred ninety nine dollars. That's around two hundred fifty dollars less than the Dell system that approachs it in cost.

And this would be why I was excited about the transition to x86 processors. Better performance, better price and better energy use. My PowerBook G4 didn't get half the batter life that my Dell Inspiron gets with its Pentium M processor. Now that they are using the same processor architecture, they can compete more evenly on merits rather than "religion." I can't wait for the Mac Minis to make the transition, I'll definitely be grabbing one of those babies for a web development machine.