Hey guys I've always used windows and apart from catching a glance of it a few times on someone else' computer, I dont really know much about mac. I'm thinking of getting a laptop now and I've decided to go for a mac. Not sure tho how to judge its performance by the specs. In intel terms, i'm looking for something like 3.0Ghz 1mb cache, 1gig ram and 128mb video memory minimum.

Well now you can buy a "MACPRO BOOK" Having a MAC is great, belive me there amazing. However it is hard to give you an answer. What applications are you going to be using? Every MAC can be upgraded to 1Gig of RAM, but there are none available with 3GHz. take a look over to www.macformat.com

Now that Apple MBP is using the same intel processor(Intel Duo Core) like PCs you may think it could be comparable. However Macs have a completely different hardware architecture than PCs. And also macs are running on Unix platform. These diference make it difficult to compare the systems. However MBP sounds to be a very fast machine. You could find a nice comparison here. http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/02/13/pricecomparison/index.php iMac G5 2.1GHZ, PC 1.1GHz OSX/ XP Pro/ SuSE/ Mandriva/ Debian/ Ubuntu maclife.techactually.com www.osxdaily.blogspot.com/

thanks for the links ppl. it does make it clearer. i'm gonna surf around a bit there and then decide what to go for.