Firstly i'm not trying to add to the anti-MB hate/controversy. And i'm not going to lie at times I will irrationally follow brands and spend insane amounts of money so I don't have a truly negative opinion about apple, i've owned and used a fair amount of their stuff. But the whole apple 'build quality' argument for me is a bit irrelevant.
I've had four laptops, a Dell Studio XPS16 (i7-720QM), a MBP 13" (Core2Duo), an Alienware M14X (i7-2670QM) and now a Dell XPS13 (i7-3537U). And they all fell into the same price bracket of £1000-1100 and were purchased in that order. Although they are all for slightly different markets I think its fair to compare them.
Now just running through them purely spec wise, they all had an i7 except for the Macbook and they all had a Full HD screen except for the Macbook. The Dells and the Alienwares were all bought with a branded sleeve made by the manufacturer, the XPS ones were leather but could you by an Apple branded sleeve? No obviously not, that's not an issue granted but for me its something that contributes to the quality and feel of the product.
Now on to build quality, the oldest of these the S-XPS16 was pretty much a solid piece of Magnesium garnished in aluminium and leather and one of the nicest plastic lids i've ever seen. The Alienware was possibly the least impressive material wise but still entirely soft touch with everything RGB illuminated and exactly what you would expect from a gaming orientated product. And my current XPS is just insanely well build, the chassis is carbon fibre, soft touch magnesium palmrest, lots of aluminium and a gorilla glass screen. The Macbook on the other hand was just Aluminium, sounds alright but it's very conductive, impossibly easy to scratch and very easy to dent, I mean it's entirely the wrong material to build a laptop from. My friends MBP has all of it's feet missing bar one and taking it apart to clean the fans out is a nightmare. But why should it be, I took apart a 4 year old Vaio that belonged to a girl the other week and there was literally no dust inside and it had never been opened before.
All of the keyboards and trackpads were equally good, none of them suffered any hardware failures and they have all been completely stable. Oh wait, with exception of the Macbook where the hard drive died after a year and it would beach ball itself to death over simple tasks like opening a word document.
There was nothing impressive about it, the OS is retarded, it was the worst built of all my laptops and there was just no joy to owning it. Nobody ever commented 'so you've got a MB then', it has literally 0 epeen, maybe even negative. Take an XPS or an Alienware out and the nerd within everyone suddenly comes alive.
For your purposes the fact that your still even thinking about a MB holds no logic, and for that reason a MB will probably be perfect for you. Really you'd be better getting two laptops here because nobody wants to run XP everyday these days. Get something nice for home and some old tank off ebay for XP duties.
JR
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