A vote for the Mac. I'm not up on the latest configs- but you will save a lot of money after purchase by NOT having to get the Geek squad in- or deal with frequent crashes and viral infections, spy ware etc. My Mac Powerbook G4 will be 5 years old in October-one hard drive replaced as I dropped the laptop. Applecare is a good investment- replacing power cords, hard drive and a broken internal wire. There are several mac laptops out there- so don't just look at the Air.