I use both an Apple iBook G4 running OSX and a Dell Dimension 8400 desktop. Both machines run fine. However, if you are going into the multimedia, photography and graphic design business, the MacBook Pro is probably the route you would want to take. Apple iPhoto (which comes with all new Macs sold today) has support for RAW image files straight from digital cameras. Microsoft Office 2004 is available for both Windows XP and MacOS X. Additionally, GarageBand from Apple (which also is standard issue on all new sold Macs) handles creating music from scratch and controlling soundtrack creation for video clips and DVD video. There is little software avaible to do the same thing on Windows for less than $100 extra, and the eye-candy software from Dell, HP, Gateway and others is usually poorly implemented and unstable. I mostly use the Dell for PC video games. I do most of the "serious" multi-media, video creation, audio soundtrack creation, photography work, and Corel/Adobe publishing work on the Apple iBook. For multimedia stuff, Apple has significantly better support for that, Dell, HP, Sony, IBM, Gateway pay poor-quality lip-service support to desktop publishing, digital photography, visual-effects creation, and multimedia content creation. If the laptop is going to be your only computer, I would actually look at Apple's lowest-end offering in the "MacBook Pro" lineup instead of the MacBooks. They are a little more expensive, but they have dedicated ATI or NVidia graphics chips instead of "integrated" Intel graphics. My iBook has a dedicated ATI graphics chip, this makes iPhoto, Photoshop, iMovie, and iDVD apps run a little smoother and more stable.