CF Apple Computer

For too many years Dell made notebooks that would go unnoticed next to a brown paper bag. Those days are gone. Dell’s new 15-inch XPS M1530 is another attractive XPS notebook–following the popular 13-inch XPS M1330–that not only rivals the Apple MacBook Pro in looks but beats it handily on price. It comes with design accents like touch-sensitive multi-media buttons, brushed aluminum accents, a choice of colors–and doesn’t skimp on materials, using a magnesium alloy on the back of the LCD.

Inside the M1530’s slim (under 6 pounds) wedge design (0.93-inch at the thinnest part of the wedge) is some fearsome hardware: the top-line configuration includes a T7800 2.6-GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of memory, high-end Nvidia GeForce 8600GT graphics, and a 250GB hard drive. All priced at a reasonable $2,024. A similarly configured 15-inch MacBook Pro is a $2,899 setback. That’s almost a $900 spread.

A mid-range M1530 configuration with a T7500 2.2-GHz Core 2 chip, 2GB of memory, Nvidia GeForce 8600GT graphics, and a 250GB hard drive is $1,624. A similarly-spec’d MacBook Pro is $2,224. Other M1530 systems are priced as low as $1,099. Now that Dells are good-looking too, Apple’s surcharge is hard to justify.