10 Reasons I Spent $3,000 on a MacBook Pro

Apple began shipping the updated 17" MacBook Pro in late February at the staggering base price of $2,799. Whoa. Many of you are probably thinking, “There are no compelling reasons to buy such an expensive laptop.” Well, I did it. In fact, I paid $2,845.84. While you may not agree with them, I thought I would share 10 reasons why I decided to buy the newest and biggest MacBook Pro rather than any other laptop.
We’ve spent plenty of time here at Tom’s Guide covering the differences between Macs versus PCs. Well, I’m over it. To me, a laptop is just a piece of hardware that runs software. The CPUs, memory, hard-disk drives (HDDs), optical drives, and other components come from the same sources whether you buy a computer from Apple, HP, Dell, or any other vendor. This article was written on a 17" MacBook Pro running Windows Vista Ultimate, with a Fujitsu 320 GB HDD, an Nvidia 9400-based motherboard, an Nvidia 9600M GT GPU, a Matshita optical drive, and an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU running at 2.66 GHz.
To me, the only thing that defines this computer as an Apple is its design, as well as a few engineering choices regarding the type and quality of the hardware. Apple is a premium product and, in my opinion, is no different from Alienware, Voodoo PC, or any other custom builder. Apple happens to include a Unix-based operating system that feels very polished and is marketed to a specific type of consumer. So, with that out of the way, here are the 10 reasons that made this updated 17" MacBook Pro worthy of my dollars.