| yeah a comparable machine would probably be half of that, but until you really stick your feet in all the way, you never really know what you're missing out on.
I think, in my case, it's an instance of "you get what you pay for."
My laptop which was only like 1500 was not quite up to the same level but, it was almost there and it was nearly half of the cost of the MacBook Pro 17", but there are a lot of inherent things that I do not like that come as a package with this PC Laptop and PCs in general. If you buy a premade one (the only way you can do it for laptops) but even desktops, you get a whole slew of programs on the computer that you don't need or won't ever use. Just wasted space and wasted time trying to uninstall them.
Not to mention the desktop icons. This toshiba laptop when it came factory default had 3 rows of icons pre-set to the desktop! Each row holding over 10 icons each. That just gives you a glimpse of how much extra fluff is on there that you won't really need!
I guess that's a minor annoyance. Does that alone warrant the cost of switching to a comparable mac? No, but that is just one example and there are a handful of other examples just like that that make a Mac worth it to me. | 
