Round 8: Price

Judging products strictly on price is a sticky proposition. Sure, the lowest price is a compelling selling point, but value (a.k.a. bang for the buck) is just as important. Due to the sheer volume of their market, PCs are nearly always less expensive than similarly configured Macs. Still, Apple computers come with a software package that would cost hundreds of dollars to purchase for a Windows system.

To help us focus, though, we return to our starting premise, which asks which laptop is better if you configure a PC and a Mac with identical components. From that perspective, the $2,499 Acer TravelMate 8200 significantly undercuts the $2,899 price tag on a MacBook Pro configured with the same processor, memory, and graphics card and a slightly smaller hard drive. (Apple fans can consider a $1,999 version of the MacBook Pro, which has lesser specs--a 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo processor, 512MB of memory, and an 80GB hard drive--but the same design and features profiled here.)

Winner: On price tag alone, the Acer TravelMate 8200 wins. Our test configuration cost $400 less than the similarly configured MacBook Pro.