[Swordmaker]

Appleworks doesn't come with the Macbook either, so I'm really a bit skeptical that we're really trying to get "as close as possible". Padding. Sorry.

Take it up with the guy who made the lists. But, Appleworks also came on my friends MacBook Pro ... fully functional. It may be a promotion but it is there.

[Senator Bedfellow]

It's not listed as being included at the Apple Store - take it up with Apple. As far as I can tell, going by what's listed there, it'll cost you an extra $160 ($158, actually) to buy Appleworks and iWork, in order to match the Corel suite. Which pushes the price up to $2957. And you still get a display and battery "far below" that of the Dell.

Regardless, I'll go so far as to concede that the Macbook is a decent machine on the high end, pricewise. Now let's look at the low end - I can spec out an E1505 dual-core laptop to match the 15.4" Macbook, for almost $600 less than the Apple. Realistically, Apple's problem has never been at the high end, it's the low end, for those folks who aren't prepared to drop $3k on a top of the line machine.