Comparing Apples and Dells
This seems to be a pretty popular sport in some nooks and crannies of the world -- viz. Mezzoblue or OSNews, so I decided to put up a feature-by-feature comparison table of the laptop I wanted to buy, and the laptop I actually bought.
Keep in mind that I would seldom use the OS X that would come with the Powerbook, and never use the OS that comes with the Dell. I much prefer KDE to OS X. Also keep in mind that these are the configurations I choose; the standard Powerbook has a DVD-writer and a bigger hard disk, and costs E2,973.81.
| Apple Powerbook 15" 1.25 Ghz | Dell Inspiron 5150 | |
| Looks |  |
 |
| Keyboard gripes | No delete | Tilde in a silly location |
| Other gripes | Dunno, never seen one in real life | Makes a whistling noise. |
| Suspend & Resume | Perfect | Suspend, but no resume... |
| CPU | G4 1.25 Ghz | Pentium 4M 3,06 Ghz |
| Battery life | Reported to be about 2 hours | 4 hours (with brightness turned down to half, but compiling a lot of stuff on the road) |
| HD | 60 GB | 40 GB |
| CD | DVD/CD-RW | DVD/CD-RW |
| RAM | 512 MB | 512 MB |
| Graphics card | ATI Radeon 64 MB | NVidia 32 MB |
| Screen quality | Never seen one life, but reported to be good | Completely perfect |
| Resolution | 1280 x 854 | 1600 x 1200 |
| Material | Aluminium | Plastic |
| Ports | 2 x USB2, 2 x Firewire, TV-out, audio in, audio out, 1000 Mbit ethernet, pcmcia, modem | 2 x USB2, Firewire, TV-out, audio in, audio out, 100 Mbit ethernet, pcmcia, modem |
| Wireless | Yes | No |
| Weight | 2.5 Kg | 3.13 Kg |
| Size (HxWxL) | 2.8 x 34.8 x 24.3 | 44.5 x 32.9 x 27.5 |
| Price (inc. VAT and transport, in Euros) | 2,664.41 | 1,306.- (now reduced to 987.- + 97.- transport) |
So, then it boils down to: is it worth paying E1,359.- for the privilege of giving up a bally perfect screen and a CPU that's twice as fast where it counts (compiling Java and C++) and a platform that's best supported by Linux to get better looks, more HD space, a conceivably tougher system and perfect suspend and resume. If the difference hadn't been more than the price of the Dell itself, I might have hesitated.