Let me share my experience about my buying process of a Macbook.

First and foremost, I wanted something small and mobile, 15" is too big and too heavy for me, and plus, not exactly a gamer, so 15"? Out.

My choices, Dell XPS M1330 or Macbook. And to be honest, Macbook was never my choice before and I almost took the XPS because of one main misconception that fools almost every living objects in this world, even Mac users, however, that is only true to a certain extent. One fine day, when I was walking around One Utama, Apple Centre(formerly known as Mac Asia) attracted my attention, anyhow, I can't hide the fact that I've always been a Mac lover. A helpful Salesperson came up to me and introduce me their products. I played a bit with their Macbooks and honestly, I found it quite hard to toy with it, but nevertheless, it makes me want to get hold of them more. I wasn't aware of their price tag at first because they weren't in my list of purchase, but after grabbing the brochures, I was shocked to find that it costs about the same as an XPS M1330! The baseline model I mean.

The specs are almost the same, if not better, but only in my opinion because of the OS as well as the design and not to mention the 4MB L2 Cache that is offered instead of 2MB. I don't need a dedicated GPU, I don't need a large HDD, I can top up the RAMs with just a couple of hundred bucks, I don't need a superdrive, and 2.0GHz core 2 duo is more than sufficient for my needs.

For the amount that I've spent, honestly, I've never been happier. The best COMPUTER that I've owned. Not Laptop.

Just sharing my experience anyway, if your parents still think that Apple is expensive...