I'm soon going to be purchasing either a MacBook or a MacBook Pro to begin school this fall. Unfortunately, the choice is a difficult one. So what I want to know is which one has the best battery life and which one is the most durable? Size is not too much of an issue because although the MacBook Pro is larger, both are fairly close in weight. I will be running Parallels to run both Windows and Ubuntu Linux so if I do choose the MacBook, I will upgrade the RAM immediately to 2 GB. Therefore, I kind of feel that the MacBook will have no room to grow. In terms of the video card, I could live without my games but I'm more concerned with longevity of the notebook. I feel the Intel GMA 950 might not cut it for much longer.

A friend of mine purchased the MacBook Pro and he is very happy with it. He advised me to go with the MBP because of the Santa Rosa chipset, the video card, backlit LED display, backlit keyboard and a maximum of 4GB of RAM. Is this worth the extra $500 from the 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook with 2GB of RAM? Which notebook is the better one for my needs?

Get the MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM and the 160GB HDD - you'll need all the RAM and HDD you can get if you're running virtual machines often!

Just don't get the RAM upgrade from Apple - the 4GB of RAM is highway robbery. Go to your average PC store, grab the correct RAM from there and put it in yourself.

macbook pros are only really usefull for people doing some sort of creative work be it photoshop, video or editing, otherwise there overkill, macbooks are great machines and plenty fast for those on a budget who still require good to great speed.

I reckon a sticky on this question would be greeeeeeat!

I agree that the MacBook will suffice for most things I need. However, it seems to have slightly older hardware than the MBP. It does not have the new Santa Rosa chipset and the Intel GMA 950 is fairly old. I fear I will suffer buyers remorse if I purchase it now as Santa Rosa may be added to the MacBook in the next revision which is supposedly this fall. I wish I really needed the graphics of the MBP so that this choice would be much easier. =P

Well depending what you need it for really. If you're going to be doing some heavy Photoshop or graphics intensive work then get a MBP for sure, but if you're really only needing it for normal school work go for the MB.

That's not to say the MB can't handle Photoshop it certainly can. In fact the MB will handle most of the Adobe apps extremely well. But if you're into really high level graphics work the MBP will deal with it faster. For video stuff I really think the MBP is the way to go and if it's gaming capability you're after, again I recommend the MBP.

I don't see the Santa Rosa as it is in the MBP going into the MB anytime soon. In any case if and when it did it will still have an integrated graphics card.

Durability wise, I've heard that the MacBook is more durable because the plastic case is thicker. I've heard reports that the MBP's aluminum casing is easily dented. In terms of battery life, Apple claims that they are about the same. Is this true? I guess the best question to ask would be has anybody purchased the MacBook Pro but regrets their decision and wished they went with the MacBook?

Love my MacBook Pro... best laptop I've ever had.

No it's not perfect (the updated model from mine is though LOL).

Get the MacBook pro. They really are along way ahead of MacBooks in some area's and will run future OS's/Software much nicer then MacBooks if you plan to keep it for along time.
Get atleast 3gb of ram (4gb is nice but 3gb would be fine)

Macbook Pro should get about 4 hours worth of word processing maybe 5, the santa rosa one has improved battery life. Can't speak for the Macbook
But I think the Macbook Pro is nicer, larger higher res screen that's not glossy, better looks and better keyboard and a decent GPU!

If i do get a macbook, will a macbook be able to run windows xp too? because i know macbook pro can do that, but im not sure if mac book can...i need to use MS Office quite often, so thats why i need to be able to run windows...but i love the look of the black Macbook, sweet as!

Yep they can run windows. But if all you need is office then you should just get the mac version of office.

I have that version, but i'm more familiar with all the PC shortcuts for MS office,
so will the programs run very slowly if i do do that?

If you use bootcamp to run windows its exactly the same as running windows on a pc. If you use Parallels or Fusion it will still be fast but not quite as fast as bootcamp. The advantage with those 2 is you run them from inside OS X unlike bootcamp.
Either way they are all fast enough to run office no problems

thanks islayer

Will get the black macbook then