Should I try Apple?

Really, it’s a question of price. The Air is awesome, but also about twice the price of a reasonable Windows machine. If you have the cash for the best, might as well get it.

The MacBook Pro is a lot cheaper than an Air and is still a great computer. It’s not as lightweight, but it’s still lighter than my old Dell Inspiron laptop was. I don’t have any trouble hauling it around with me.

Well, the advice about checking with the school was good. Interestingly, the school’s bookstore offers Apple laptops at about a 10:1 ratio to Windows machines, but everything mentioned on the “technical requirements” portion for the school listed Windows/Microsoft software (MS Office and the like). So I think I will stick with Windows after all just to prevent any possible issues- and besides, Windows 7 has been great for me so far.

The school bookstore has an HP Pavilion DV6 (15.6" screen, 640GB hdd) available online… but it is very short on details. I have emailed to get more specs, but I am curious if anybody here has any experience with HPs computers. I like HP printers, but don’t know what kind of quality to expect from these machines.

You can run MS Office on a Mac.

You may want to start a new thread for advice on HP computers, as there may be people with info on this who will bypass an Apple thread.

I have an Air and it came with Office 2011. WAY better then the Office you get on a PC! Much more intuitive and awesome templates, especially in Power Point.

I think you can buy Office 2011 for Mac for about $100. It’s fully cross compatible. I am in University as well and the faculty uses standard PC’s and Windows, and I had not had any compatibility issue with their materials, nor did they have any issues with my submitted assignments.

I realize you are now looking at an HP, but I just wanted to share with the participants of this thread that this case for a MacBook Air rules:

I agree with this. IMO, it is much easier to use than my husband’s Office 2007 for Windows. We trade documents back and forth without any problems.

Out of curiosity, what makes Mac office 2011 better then windows office 2007?
I might need to look into getting it for my work mac.
I use 2007 windows office on my personal laptop and 2003 mac office at work. The 2003 mac office drives me crazy. Excel is pitiful on 2003 mac office and regularly chokes on my admittedly very large spreadsheets when my laptop which is less then half as powerful works just fine.

I am glad to hear that it is much improved in the new version.

For me it’s just the templates and the way all the features are laid out. It’s easier to figure out how things work (For instance, I had to start using citation management on my Mac at school - super easy. When I got home and tried on my work PC, I had to use Help to figure it out). It’s easy to drag and drop images and charts in to Power Point, and using outline mode on the Mac seems to be a bit easier then on a PC. And did I mention the templates? They’re awesome, especially in PP.