The design of the new Macbooks are obviously years ahead of PC notebooks. The Macbooks are smoothly built, great heat dispersion, and OSX is great for design work. Upon asking if they had a Macbook available, I was going to purchase one right there and then. No stranger to my impulsive purchase decisions, my girlfriend stopped me by pointing out that I should check on PC notebooks as well. I thought that it was only fair I do a proper pre-purchase research.

I went to Costco to roundout my research when I saw a cool little 12.1″ HP Pavilion TX2623CA notebook for $300 cheaper than the Apple Macbook. At this point I was still leaning towards the Macbook because I didn’t have a computer with OSX at home and I wanted to fill in that void. But check out this list of Pros and Cons:

Apple Macbook:
Faster CPU @ 2.0 Core 2 Duo, 2 GB Ram.

HP Pavilion TX2623CA:
AMD Athlon X2 QL-62 Dual-Core (equals to around 1.6 to 1.8 Core 2 Duo), 4 GB Ram.

Apple Macbook:
Great heat dispersion, more advanced track pad, looks very sleek, runs OSX.

HP Pavilion TX2623CA:
Heats up very quickly and needs a cooling pad or laptop fan, not as sleek looking by far, runs Windows.
At this point the Macbook is slightly ahead even with the $300 difference. Then I read on and saw the awesome features the HP has:

Features:
Fingerprint reader, memory card reader, Altec Lansing Speakers, touch screen, rotatable/convertible tablet screen(can flip the screen to collapse into a tablet configuration), built-in wacom tablet on screen, 2 headphone jacks, standard remote control.
Screw the Macbook. The HP costs less, has more ram, a cool finger print reader that I can show off to friends, a rotatable screen that I can use for adhoc presentations Tablet style, and a built-in screen wacom. The Wacom Cintiq 12WX (12″ Wacom tablet with a built in screen) costs $1,000 by itself. And now if I buy this HP I get it built-in already? Now that’s a great deal.

With a built-in Cintiq Wacom, I can use Photoshop or Painter to sketch out a few masterpieces or take notes during presentations. I was going to hook up a regular Wacom tablet to the Macbook anyways, but now this makes it infinitely more convenient.

Needless to say, I fell in love with the HP TX2623CA and been using it since. But what do you think of my decision to sacrifice OSX in exchange for additional features? Am I nuts?