I am starting my first year of collage soon and was saving up for a macbook pro. I configured the specs the way I wanted and it was around $1,500.
I decided I wouldn’t make the same mistake I did with my last MacBook with a shared memory-256Mb-9400M GPU. I configured an Alienware M11x w/ the Core2Duo, 4Gb DDR3 RAM, 500Gb 7200RPM HD, for $1,000, but here’s the kicker!

A couple of my friends have MacBook Pros, I know people with the 13, 15, and 17 inch corei series macbooks. All of them have 4Gb of ram. The funny thing is my m11x beats the crap out of them in almost every way!

The 17″ MacBook Pro only has 512Mb of VRAM Dedicated and is a 330M not 335. (The 335 has about a 225Mhz clocked speed difference along side twice the vram)

In Apps such as the Unity Game Engine, Cinema 4D, 3DS Max, Blender, Photoshop CS4, Adobe Premiere and Adobe Illustrator CS4 as well as Reason 4, Ableton Live 8 all ran much faster on my m11x than a $2,200 MacBook Pro. I will admit that everything loaded faster on the MacBook Pro beacuse it has a faster CPU, but when it came down to doing my actual work, the m11x kicked major a$$!

It also plays games waaay better than the MacBook Pro 17″ You just can’t beat the faster clocked GPU with twice the dedicated vram. If you have a 13″ macbook then you are in the dust technology wise and are paying $500 extra for less, at least hardware wise, I’m going to be honest though. I like OS X better than windows, but so much that I pay over twice has much for less performance just so I don’t get viruses and crash once in a blue moon. If I had a macbook pro I would put windows on it to game anyway, and it’s hell switching os’s every time I want to go from work to play or vice versa.

Considering the size, specs, and lighting effects, this has to be the best laptop purchase of my entire life, and I’ve owned a crap load of laptops, both mac and pc.