When I speak to potential students and give tours here at Northeastern, there's a big question many students ask me: Mac or PC. My answer: which ever you like more and feel you could use every day. My choice is Mac and I'll try to share why.
WWDC has came and gone. Apple made some amazing updates to their product line and have updated their iPhone/iPod software. Also, come september, we'll see a new version of Mac OS called Snow Leopard, which make some strides the abilities of the OS. You can now get a MacBook for under $1000 as a student. A MacBook Pro is just slightly more, but well worth it since it now has a nicer screen and SD card reader (and many other features of course).
Many people say that's quite a bit of money for a computer, and you're right it is, however you get what you pay for. Personally, I enjoy the dependability of my Mac. Just over 2 years old now, my 2.16 GHz MacBook Pro is running just as good as the day I got it (actually faster because of a slight upgrade). The most common thing I hear from anyone who owns a computer is, "it stopped working today and I don't know what to do!" I've found this not to be a big deal with a Mac, you can take it to the apple store and they'll give you a pretty decent answer. I once had a fan, screen and battery replaced in 4 hours. Quite impressive!
I've found Mac's to generally just work! If things go wrong and something happens, just make sure you have an external hard drive hooked up and Time Machine running. Time Machine is a key part to keeping everything backed up on your computer. Not only does it back up your files, but it saves all versions when it backs it up. You can literally step back in time to each backup and see the files. You can also restore all your files if you need to reinstall your os for any reason. (Can you say easy?!)