I happened to have my nice new 15" PB 1.33/60G/768M/combo at work yesterday when a guy comes in and asks me to install some software on his personal laptop. He hauls out this behemoth of a 17" HP he bought at Costco - says he paid $1600 for it. So I set it up next to mine and loaded the requested software on it, then fooled around with it for a while. His was a P4 2.66/40G/512M machine.
Overall: Similar features (HP has no FW800 but more USB ports, and of course a 17" screen - VGA but no DV output, etc.) Similar performance (the megahertz myth is true!) Apple far superior in hardware design than HP and in software design than MS.
System design: Not even in the same league as Apple. Ticky-tack design.
Build quality: About the same. The HP is built like a tank (must have weighed 11 pounds), but the fan(s) are kind of noisy. Nice keyboard feel, etc.
XP vs OSX: Functionally they're about the same, but OSX is much more elegantly implemented.
Performance: About the same. It's hard to compare apples and oranges since the software suite is so much different. For instance, launching IE is little bit faster on the PB but after the program is cached launching it again shows the windows machine to be significanlty faster. Web browsing is about the same. Opening up a similarly sized pdf file is much faster on the PB, due to the superior performance of Preview over Acrobat. He had iTunes installed - opens much faster on the PB. However, his speakers sounded a lot better than mine when actually playing a song.
End result: Glad I bought my PB! Maybe you should, too.
Overall: Similar features (HP has no FW800 but more USB ports, and of course a 17" screen - VGA but no DV output, etc.) Similar performance (the megahertz myth is true!) Apple far superior in hardware design than HP and in software design than MS.
System design: Not even in the same league as Apple. Ticky-tack design.
Build quality: About the same. The HP is built like a tank (must have weighed 11 pounds), but the fan(s) are kind of noisy. Nice keyboard feel, etc.
XP vs OSX: Functionally they're about the same, but OSX is much more elegantly implemented.
Performance: About the same. It's hard to compare apples and oranges since the software suite is so much different. For instance, launching IE is little bit faster on the PB but after the program is cached launching it again shows the windows machine to be significanlty faster. Web browsing is about the same. Opening up a similarly sized pdf file is much faster on the PB, due to the superior performance of Preview over Acrobat. He had iTunes installed - opens much faster on the PB. However, his speakers sounded a lot better than mine when actually playing a song.
End result: Glad I bought my PB! Maybe you should, too.