I’m in the mar­ket for a new lap­top and I pur­pose­fully waited for the new Mac­Books to be released. I priced out a Dell XPS M1330 and once the fea­tures are matched up as close as I can make them, there’s a $60 price dif­fer­ence in favor of the Dell. $1599 vs $1533. The Mac­Book comes out ahead in GPU, FSB, and oper­at­ing sys­tem (OS X > Vista because of Unix) and the Dell comes out ahead in terms of con­nec­tors (HDMI, Firewire, card reader, Express­Card slot, etc.). I tried to con­fig­ure a com­pa­ra­ble Ubuntu machine, but the proces­sor speed is fixed at 2.0 GHz and eas­ily went over com­pared to the $1299 Mac­Book. The only com­peti­tor now is a late model 15″ Mac­Book Pro which for refurb starts at $1349—a very tasty price indeed. The MBP matches the advan­tages of the m1330 and has a bet­ter GPU, screen size, and res­o­lu­tion than the new Mac­Book. How much bet­ter is the GPU? Let’s see.

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Are you really sav­ing any money? Not really.

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My TDMA ser­vice through AT&T Wire­less is num­bered. More so now since they’re upping the main­te­nance charge from $5 to $10 next month, giv­ing me an even greater incen­tive to switch plans. The rea­son I’ve been hold­ing back on upgrad­ing, despite hav­ing an ancient brick of a phone (Nokia 5165), is because even with the main­te­nance charge, my bill is $10 less than the cheap­est con­tract avail­able from AT&T. Now that the price gap is smaller, this gave me the moti­va­tion to ana­lyze my usage and com­pare rate plans.

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