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Here is my take, having owed two Dell's, wanting a macbook, and studying premed and graduating with a BS in biology.
First off - under no circumstance should you consider anything in the
Dell Inspiron series. They are garbage. The parts of cheap, they
break, and while they are decent about fixing them, you end up on the
phone for HOURS with people in India who do not speak well. Trust me.
I must have spent 30 hours over the years talking to those fuckers and
it is MISERABLE.
That said, NOT all Dell's are total garbage. The Latitude laptops, in
my experience, have been significantly nicer. I have still had some
issues, but no where near what I had to deal with when I had my
insprion. For what it is worth, almost my Dad's entire office uses
them and I have had more issues with mine than his whole office, so I
must just be unlucky or something. Anyway.....The biggest thing here
is the tech help is all American. I can call them up, actually
understand what they are saying, and someone will come to my apartment
and fix my computer within 24-48 hours. I don't need to send it out
(like I did with the inspiron....even though I had service where they
were supposed to come fix it where I was.....again - the language
barrier makes it a bitch at times).
Cost wise, the Dell is going to be less, but not that much cheaper than the Mac, depending on the software you end up getting.
From a science perspective, some schools do some stuff on macs, but in
four years of bio, chem, and physics classes, I used a mac one time
ever. BUT, in most of your classes where you are doing any sort of lab
work, research, etc involving computers, they will be provided, so you
could have a mac and still get all your work done because the school is
using PC. The only time this was an issue was when some kids tried to
get certain things to transfer over from the macs to the PC and
sometimes it didn't go as smoothly as it should have.
This is for bio/chem classes mostly.
For engineering, if that is something you were considering, you are
definitely going to be using programs on your personal computer more.
At least engineers I knew did. If that is the case, than having a PC
might be a better option for you.
BUT you can run XP/Vista on macs fine. So you could still get a mac and be ok.
I know people who ONLY run XP on their macs at their jobs (venture
capital) because they like the hardware that much more, but for their
job, running windows just works much better.
Personally, I would considering getting a Dell again, but something
that was at least a Latitude, have 4 years of on-site support with
American tech help, and was a good bit cheaper than the Mac. The only
downfall, IMO, for the mac is the price, because they are not cheap.
I am sure there are better PC out there, too, but I don't know all that much about this. Just basis this off my experiences.
Personally, if I can afford it next time, I will be getting a macbook.
The pro is nice, and I worried the normal macbook would be too small,
but after playing with my roommates a lot, I think the size is fine and
the macbook pro really isn't worth the extra cost unless you are doing lost of video/photo/graphic work. At work I will be
running external monitors anyway to help with big excel sheets and
such. Plus, for the business side of things, I can just throw XP on
there, which is nice. I am not too much of a fan of the Office for
Mac, but again, just boot it up and use office on XP/Vista.
So that was sort of a ramble, but I will try to some it up here. The
lower end Dell's are garbage. Run away and run away fast. The
business class Dell's are better, in terms of hardware and tech help.
Macs, at this point, really do offer the best of both worlds though.
Their warranty is damn good, the hardware is awesome, you can run PC
and mac programs, etc.
