Apple MacBook Air MD231LL/A: Dual Core i5 1.8GHz, 13.3" LCD (1440x900), 4GB DDR3, 128GB SSD, Mac OS X Lion $999 or $1009

You've never used a macbook air as your primary laptop before have you? It's fantastic. Long time PC/Linux/*NIX(hp-ux & bsd) user here. I used to think the same way, until I played with my friends' macs for a bit and started to fall in love with the build quality and all the little luxuries. It's like saying you can buy a mustang gt with no addons that'll do 0 - 60 in x seconds, or a bmw m3 that'll do 0 - 60 in X - y seconds, but also come with all these weird little nicety "oh! they thought of this!" features.

I was strongly considering the asus zenbook equivalent of the macbook air, but I ended up getting sold on LCD panel quality and keyboard/trackpad with the macbook air. The zenbook's keyboard was recessed slightly and not backlit at the time, so it made typing awkward and trying to find the "special" laptop buttons (volume, brightness, etc) would've been more difficult. Also, being a *NIX user, I greatly appreciated native bsd being the back end of this machine, and not having to play with possibly having unsupported hardware if I were to wipe Windows off the zenbook and use a Linux distro.

Laptops are very personal to people, and for some, it's not all about the main "computer" component hardware(comparing cpus, available ram, gpus, etc), but how they're assembled, the overall quality of all the components as one, and the user experience.

Apple should dump OSx and sell their hardware with Win7; they'd increase their market share.

Apple should dump OSx and sell their hardware with Win7 on it. They'd increase their market share.

People buy BMW, Audi, etc., cars for a reason (mostly) - not because they like getting "taken to the cleaners"