[cd34]

If you get one, I would suggest making sure you get one with the NVidea graphics chipset if you're thinking refurb -- all of the newer ones have the NVidea cards. My previous one had the Intel embedded one and my nephew tried WoW on it and it was quite sluggish. On the one with the NVidea card, it performs better than his current PC.

The white polycarbonate cases are not nearly as durable -- mine didn't last two years. For $149 I can replace the keyboard 'tray' which is the part that cracked. The laptop itself is still in working order but has the older Intel card and switching windows and screen redraws were slow.

The base aluminum macbook is a pretty good unit. The aluminum case on mine appears to be much more rugged. Put in the extra ram - their ram isn't the cheapest, but, you get the refund on the 'old' memory which you would throw away if you did the upgrade yourself.

Whether you go for the Pro is more a screen size and budget thing. The small boost in cpu horsepower wasn't enough to entice me -- the larger screen meant less portability for me. Simon probably still hasn't gotten his new one yet.

There are refurb Airs for $999 which are decent IF the limitations are able to be worked around. If you were going to do USB, needed to connect to a wired network from time to time, and had wifi with a reasonable battery life and didn't mind the smaller form factor, the macbook is a pretty decent machine. With bootcamp, he could dual boot windows and Mac os/x for his games. If you wanted firewire, I think you have to go to the Pro which has the larger screen.

Also, there is a rumor that apple is going to reduce the cost of some of their machines early soon. I would suspect the white polycarbonate machine and possibly their imac's are going to have their entry model price lowered.

openoffice.org is a very decent Microsoft Office replacement and does well.