Consumer Reports is biased against Macs.

I also am a Mac user (and biased towards them). The claim is that Macs are more expensive than PC notebooks. But that doesn't bear out when you look at specifications. What is true is that Mac doesn't offer any of the truly low-end notebooks. But for similarly spec'd computers, the price is very similar for Mac vs. PC.

Before I bought my MacBook Pro last December I priced a Dell notebook with the same configuration (as much as possible). The Dell was several hundred dollars more and they didn't offer a processor as fast as the one one I spec'd for the MBP.

If you are budget-minded, take a look at the white MacBook, starting at $999. The specifications were just upped in the last week or so. You'll save a few hundred dollars over the silver MacBook.

And remember that you can run Windows natively or through emulation with programs such as VMWare Fusion. I have some Windows programs that run better on my Macs than they ever did on my Dell!