No one tell my wife I wrote this, because if she hears me say “more money”, I’ll end up with one of those $100 laptop-for-ever-child jobbers this fall.

My dilemma is this: I’ve been using my Mac Mini at work for over a week now, and I kind of like it. The benefits are pretty intangible, but I just feel like my computer is somehow more “refined” than ye old PC. Unfortunately, that leads me to this demise: if I get a Mac, it’s going to cost me more.

Yeah, yeah, save all the stuff about pricing being close, because the hardware side of things is pretty even. My cost comes in when you factor in software. You see, I’m headed off to seminary, and there’s a few programs that I’ll need working this fall: e-Sword (or the alternative, $350 Bible Works), and MS Office. Because e-Sword requires a PC to run, I’d have to buy a copy of Parallels ($70) and XP (~$90). So now, the extra ~$100 that I’d pay for a “better” laptop has become ~$260. Not too horrible, but remember: I’m going to seminary, not law school. I’m already going to have to buy Office 2003 ($100 student version), and this is starting to become more and more of an investment.

No, I can’t pirate the software (hello, seminary!), and no, I can’t just run Office 2004 on the Mac (well, I could, but it costs more, and I wouldn’t be able to install it on my PC as well, using their nice 3-PC license). <sigh> Why can’t things be easy? I was just starting to like OS X… Maybe that Dell Latitude D520 wouldn’t be such a bad deal after all.