Best laptop: Apple MacBook

Apple makes the best laptops out there. period. They are beautifully-designed, high-quality, and a great value (price/performance). While I have a MacBook Pro, most people don’t need the extras that the Pro incudes (larger screen, bigger hard drive, more graphics memory) at the cost of nearly doubling the price. However I do recommend that you don’t buy the cheapest MacBook. The DVD writer, extra memory, and extra hard drive space will all be things you’ll grow into and be glad you got after a few years.

Of course one of the main selling points of the Mac is that it runs Mac OS X — widely considered to be friendlier and easier to use than Windows. The visual design is lighter, simpler, and polished to a high shine. For basic Internet use, music, photos and other basic consumer tasks, the Mac shines. And as an amatuer musician, GarageBand is a fantastic application. There is nothing like it on the PC at any price.

However if you need to run Windows, your MacBook can do it. You can boot directly into Windows using the free Boot Camp utility provided by Apple. Or you can get virtual machine (VM) software — Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion — and run Windows as a separate application within Mac OS X. I’ve done both, but lately I prefer the latter as I only need Windows occasionally. Ironically, PC World reported in October 2007 that the MacBook Pro was the fastest Windows laptop that they tested. On the down side, there is no dedicated second mouse button or forward delete key, but you can work around these with a two-finger touch pad + click and fn+delete respectively.Get a MacBook from Amazon