I bought a Macbook in mid-April, and I'm very happy with it. I got the black model for its larger hard drive. Part of the reason I bought it is because I'm an IT contractor, and my current main customer has about a dozen Macs on site. They have another company that supports the Macs, but I wanted to be familiar. It came with 2 gigs of RAM, but I bought an upgrade from crucial.com, so I have 4 gigs now. I also bought VMware Fusion and an OEM Vista Ultimate so that I can run Windows apps. It works fine, but you might be happier with Windows XP.

As far as price goes, the low-end Macbook is $1099, and pretty much nobody discounts them. An extra $200 gets you a somewhat faster processor, more RAM, a bigger hard drive, and a SuperDrive, which allows you to write DVDs. Don't do it for the processor or the RAM. Buying third-party RAM is much cheaper, and for your intended uses, processor speed is very unlikely to be a bottleneck for you. I'm glad I have a SuperDrive, but if you don't think you'll need to write DVDs, then don't spend the money. You can get an external DVD burner later on for less than $200, if you decide you need one.

VMware Fusion is $80, and you can get XP Pro SP2 online for around $120. You can download a 30-day trial of Fusion, and there is also the Boot Camp option for installing Windows, but that means you boot into Windows or boot into Mac OSX, and you can't run both at the same time. But if you install Windows under Boot Camp, you can then use that installation if you install Fusion later on.

I have been using Windows since 3.1, and Linux since the mid-'90s. I had occasional exposure to Apple, but was not a big fan. Since buying my Macbook, I find I am using it at least 90% of the time, and rarely even starting up Fusion. I use Windows for a few pieces of software that require it, and to sync my Windows Mobile device. I use NeoOffice on the Macbook to read and write Word and Excel files. I prefer web-based GMail to any external mail program, although I do have Outlook and Entourage installed so I can support other users. I prefer Firefox to Safari or IE, and it works perfectly for everything except my Rosetta Stone online subscription (requires an older version of Shockwave), so for that I use Safari or go to Windows mode.

Anyway, hope that helps!

-Gary-