I want a gaming and music production oriented laptop with up to 4gbs of ram 3 usb drives a cd and dvd burner a webcam and a good graphics card. So far the 17 inch macbook pro has all of that but alot of people are telling me that you can get the same thing for cheaper on a pc but all i hear is mac is better mac, mac, mac. Why? Why should I stick with the mac when i can get the same thing on a pc for cheaper? BTW on the macbook pro can you upgrade the harddrive? And isn't 8 hours of batter life average?
music and video production are where the mac excels.. but the software is stupidly expensive.. add to that the price of the hardware and they aren't competitive..
basic laptop running unix will do as well.. for gaming?. a laptop??.. reconsider your choices.. because in 18 months you will need yet another new one.
"I want a gaming and music production oriented laptop with up to 4gbs of ram 3 usb drives a cd and dvd burner a webcam and a good graphics card. "
What software do you plan to use? You have a list of tasks but haven't even looked at software. If the software you want is PC only then a Mac is pretty much out of the question unless you want to run Windows on a Mac, but then, IMHO "What's the point"?
"So far the 17 inch macbook pro has all of that but alot of people are telling me that you can get the same thing for cheaper on a pc but all i hear is mac is better mac, mac, mac. Why? Why should I stick with the mac when i can get the same thing on a pc for cheaper?"
I think you answered your own question. Refer to my answer to number 1. I agree with Varnull that Apple has always been further ahead of the curve for music and graphics (with the exception of the Atari 1024. Go ahead, ask Todd Rundgren<G>)
"BTW on the macbook pro can you upgrade the harddrive?"
Yes
" And isn't 8 hours of batter life average?"
No. 8 hours is typically a manufacturer's estimate and like MPG on an automobile, YMMV. 8 hours at idle doing nothing, maybe.
If you are asking these questions I don't think that you have done enough homework yet. Since you seem to have a specific task that you want to do, (i.e. "I want a gaming and music production oriented laptop ") with rather vague and general specification, I would suggest that you haven't narrowed down the usage requirements enough.
P.S. If you want a gaming laptop, a Mac may be a less than optimal choice. Very few popular mainstream PC games are ported to the Mac and though I haven't seen any benchmarks for Windows on Mac, I can't imagine that it's anything close to native hardware (but I'm happy to be contradicted if that's the case).
