Which laptop?

My iMac at home is over 3 years old now. The Applecare is up and most importantly, it is maxed out at 2gb of RAM. While I don't do anything too processor intensive, I do keep lots of apps open to do my work, and this quickly eats up all the memory. If I want to run Vmware to test something in Windows, then everything comes to a crawl, or I have to quit several apps. Plus, I would like to get a laptop so I have some flexibility about where I do my work.

I do have an Acer Aspire One netbook, and its great, I am using it right now, but with its 1gb of memory and small screen its not great for working on for long periods, or on anything too complicated.

Apple's MacBook Pros are beautiful. I could easily transition all my stuff from my current Mac over to one of those and be up and running smoothly. However they are very pricey. The reality is, if you consider inflation, the cost of Mac laptops is about half what it was 6-7 years ago, but the cost of laptops in general is about a quarter of what is was. Although pricey, I know I'll get at least 3 good years out of a Mac. With a PC, for less money, I can get a lot more power and features, but the battery life, size, weight, and build quality won't be there. From all I have looked around, the price difference between eqivalent or better PC laptops (save the above issues) is $500 to over $1000 over a similar Mac. This is especially apparent with Sony's new FW series which seriously beats out the 17" MacBook Pro for around $1500 compared to $2300 or more.

So my Mac still would work great for non-work stuff, where it has what is still reasonably good graphics and processor. For work, what I need most is memory, to keep a lot of stuff running at once, and to get PC with 4GB is a pretty easy to find. So I'm also looking at the Acer Timeline laptops. They go for around $600-$700 and are about the same dimensions as the MacBook Air, but with less of a processor, and up to 8 hours battery life. One of those would be great for portability, and on the wallet, but I probably would want to upgrade it sooner, but at that price I could buy one a year for 3 years and end up spending about the same as I would on a Mac. Running Linux, it could handle all I need for work quite nicely.

So I keep putting off getting anything while I think this over. If only Apple would lower their prices in some serious way. I love Macs, but they have become more fashion than technology, and the pricing proves it.