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For years, the Mac vs. PC debate has been fuelled mostly by subjective ranting; the platforms and the components were so different that it was impossible to compare fundamental characteristics such as performance.

Macs have been on Intel processors for some time now though, making analysing Mac versus PC hardware a bit more like comparing (ahem) apples to apples. Not to mention more and more PC vendors are copying Apple's style and features in order to stay competitive. Things are more alike than they've ever been.

To that end, we're pitting the MacBook Pro 13-inch against the closest PC competitor we've seen to date - the Asus U80V. Both models feature 2GB RAM, a 500GB hard drive and a Core 2 Duo at 2.53GHz - although the Asus contains a T9400 with 6MB L2 cache and 35W TDP, while the MacBook contains a P8700 with 3MB L2 and 25W TDP. Both have backlit keyboards and multi-touch touchpads, have 802.11n and Bluetooth support, and cram in a DVD writer. Batteries are close, with the Asus being rated at 60-Watt hours, the MacBook at 58. True, the Asus has a 14-inch screen while the MacBook is 13-inch, but they do weigh almost the same, the MacBook at 2.04kg, the Asus at 2.15kg.

There are differences, of course - the MacBook Pro has a 250GB hard drive, 4GB RAM, runs OS X 10.5.8 and features an Nvidia GeForce 9400M, while the Asus comes in at 500GB, 2GB RAM, runs Vista Home Premium SP2 and packs an ATI Radeon HD4570.

We've compared them not only on performance and battery life but on characteristics such as design, features and price. All to answer one fundamental question: if you have a PC and a Mac with near identical components, which laptop reigns supreme?

Round one: design

Good looks aren't everything.

Proudly declaring "Designed by Apple in California" on all of its packaging, Apple has helped fetishise clean product design - and the MacBook Pro is no exception. With a sleek aluminium case and minimalist, unibody design, the MacBook Pro inspires a desire to cradle it protectively. That said, the Asus U80V is no slouch in the aesthetics department; its piano-black case has deep sparkling accents that are reminiscent of automotive design, and its silver on black design oozes professionalism.

But as any designer will tell you, good looks will get you only so far. In the case of laptops, a great design is one that's functional as well as aesthetically pleasing. Apple's dedication to simplicity and minimalism has resulted in some truly elegant innovations. The multi-touch touchpad here is a prime example: it lets you scroll through documents and web pages by dragging two fingers across it, right-click by tapping two fingers, access Exposé by swiping four fingers vertically or switch applications by doing the same horizontally. You can also navigate through images by swiping three fingers, and pinch your fingers to zoom, or rotate them to, yep, rotate the image. It's an elegant system that you soon find you can't live without.

It also has a backlit keyboard that adjusts to changes in ambient light levels; a button that illuminates LEDs to tell you how much battery is left; and the MagSafe power connector, which gracefully detaches from the laptop if you accidentally trip over the cord. The screen even closes softly with a satisfyingly soft "whump".

PCs have caught up on the Mac in recent years, with the Asus featuring a multi-touch touchpad as well. It has all the same features (except for the Exposé access, of course), although some of the actions have changed. You tap three fingers for a right-click, two for a middle-click - and you get a series of cool lights tracing your finger as it moves vertically up and down. It doesn't seem as reliable as Apple's solution though, with the Asus often misinterpreting the intention of swipes.

It also has a backlit keyboard that, unlike the Mac, allows the user to set the brightness (or turn it on or off), and has an ambient light detector, which sets the brightness of the screen depending on its environment, saving on battery. The piano black coating, however, may drive you batty, collecting fingerprints faster than a crime scene.

Both feature chiclet-style keyboards and glossy screens, the former being good, the latter annoying in high light situations or if a light-source is near. Apple's use of edge-to-edge glass and what appears to be a higher quality screen gives it the advantage here, the Asus looking cheap and plastic in comparison.

The Apple completely undercuts the Asus in terms of physical dimensions, which is bad for boxers, but good for laptops. The unibody aluminium chassis and glass screen punish it though, pushing it to 2.04kg next to the Asus' 2.15kg, despite the Asus being a larger laptop.

The winner? Although it's tighter today than it's ever been, the MacBook Pro is the winner for its innovative usability features and stunning good looks. Does that make us shallow?

	Round 1	Round 2	Round 3	Round 4	Round 5	Round 6	Round 7	Round 8
Apple
Asus

Round two: display

Which would you rather stare at for hours a day?

At 13 inches, the MacBook Pro's display has a standard 1280x800 native resolution, while the 14-inch Asus U80 has a wider 1366x768. This is one of the defining differences between PCs and Macs - Apple has yet to embrace 16:9 screens, offering the higher resolution 16:10 screens instead. Realistically, it won't make much of a difference, but if you're a huge film buff, you'll appreciate the 16:9 ratio. The prevalence of 16:9 panels in the TV world also means it should be cheaper to produce these types of screens, bringing the overall cost down. But what about image quality?

Brightness

A brighter laptop display gives you greater flexibility for working in a variety of lighting conditions. Both are LED backlit, but the Apple is visibly brighter when placed next to the Asus. Advantage: Apple.

Text

We examined a text document (WordPad on the PC, TextEdit on the Mac) that included samples of various text styles and sizes, searching for letters that bled together or looked blurry. Text on the Asus' screen was crisper and easier to read than on the MacBook Pro's, and we found that most letters on the MacBook Pro looked blurry and its anti-aliasing too strong, especially at lower font sizes. Advantage: Asus.

Colour and viewing angles

Playing back Adaptation, we analysed the sharpness, detail and colour quality of DVD playback and looking for instances of ghosting or blurring. The MacBook Pro displayed amazing colours with sharp contrast and no bleeding or streaking. Gradation of colours was also impressive for a laptop screen. The Asus, by contrast, exhibited merely average colours, with it unable to determine the range of colours as shown by the MacBook Pro, losing details and tending to look oversaturated by comparison. Advantage: Apple.

Winner: The bright, beautiful MacBook Pro display takes this round, though its text rendering is not a knockout.

	Round 1	Round 2	Round 3	Round 4	Round 5	Round 6	Round 7	Round 8
Apple
Asus

Round three: features

Connections are key.

If you believe the marketing hype, everything on a laptop is a feature, from the lid latch to the dock connector. But for comparison's sake, we've broken features down into three subcategories: audio/video, storage and slots, and networking. Things have improved massively for Apple here recently, offering nearly the same options as the PC competitors.

Audio/video

Apple prides itself on its products' audiovisual capabilities - but the MacBook Pro includes the bare minimum of A/V features: a microphone and some average but loud speakers, one FireWire 800 port and only two USB 2.0 ports for connecting to external peripherals, such as a camera or a mouse. It also has mini-DisplayPort video out, although its usefulness will be limited, as you'll need to buy an adapter to hook it up to anything other than Apple's own monitors. Apple also doesn't support HDMI, so you'll need to get a third-party adapter and send sound over another wire if you wish to hook up to your TV.

The Asus U80V has all of this except the FireWire 800 and mini-DisplayPort, but trumps with VGA and HDMI out and one additional USB 2.0 port. Both have line in and out 3.5mm jacks, both support optical audio out, and both have webcams, although the MacBook Pro's video quality is significantly better. The Asus' speakers are also a lot quieter than the Apple's, but the built-in SRS Premium Sound application goes some way to addressing this.

It's closer than ever this year, but the PC just edges out the Apple due to the extra connectivity. Advantage: Asus.

Storage and slots

If you have lots of MP3s or digital video, storage capacity matters, and the Asus U80V provides an extra 250GB of storage space compared to our MacBook Pro test configuration. While both laptops are equipped with dual-layer DVD burners and the MacBook Pro has picked up an SD card reader capable of reading SD, SDHC and MMC, the Asus manages an Express Card slot and a card reader which does SD, SDHC, MMC, MS/Pro/Duo, Smart Media and xD. Advantage: Asus.

Networking

The MacBook Pro and the Asus U80V both include gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR (Enhanced Data Rate), and 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi connectivity. Advantage: Nil.

Winner: The Asus U80V takes this round, although the MacBook Pro has almost caught up this year.

	Round 1	Round 2	Round 3	Round 4	Round 5	Round 6	Round 7	Round 8
Apple
Asus

Round five: performance

Editor's note: we'll return to this soon with Snow Leopard and Windows 7 benchmarks soon.

Who will win the multimedia drag race?

Any late-model laptop will do for basic tasks such as checking email and browsing the web, just like most any car will get you from point A to point B. But with dual-core processors, discrete graphics and plenty of RAM, these souped-up hot rods are made for more than checking out LOLcats. We tested their speed on a variety of multimedia tasks to determine just how fine-tuned they are in OS X 10.5.8, Vista SP2, and running Vista SP2 under Boot Camp on the Mac.

To make the match up more even, we removed 2GB RAM from the MacBook Pro, so both systems were running on 2GB.

Image editing

We timed how long it took for Adobe Photoshop CS3 to execute our custom Action file on a collection of seven raw images, around 12MB in size. The Action file applies a number of Photoshop's built-in filters, converts to greyscale and exports the resulting images as moderately compressed JPEG files.

While the Mac takes the lead, look at its Photoshop scores when running Windows Vista - a hefty increase. You'd definitely be running the Mac native version of Photoshop if you had an Apple laptop.

3D rendering

The Cinebench benchmark measures processor and graphics performance for rendering shaded images, taking advantage of a multithreaded, multi-core processor, such as Intel's Core Duo.

Once again the MacBook Pro crosses the line before the U80V - interesting for a pure CPU benchmark like Cinebench, and especially since the U80V has the processor with the higher L2 cache. We can only assume this is a 32/64-bit difference.

iTunes encoding

Using iTunes, we timed how long it took to convert 19 MP3 files to iTunes Plus quality AAC files.

A dead heat! Once again when the MacBook is running Vista, it takes a performance hit.

Video encoding

Using our own custom 1GB raw .avi file, we timed how long it took the VLC player to convert it to a 3072Kbps H.264 file without sound.

The Mac takes the performance crown, leaving the PC to choke in its dust. Running Vista on the Mac once again resulted in a performance hit though compared to the U80V.

Gaming graphics performance

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare can be quite a demanding title, and is thankfully available for OS X and Windows, despite Apple's history of not being a gaming platform. This will mostly be a function of graphics cards, and since the Mac contains a more powerful card, the result is almost predetermined.

Our settings were as follows: 1024x768, 2xAA, Sync Every Frame: No, Shadows: No, Specular Map: Yes, Depth of Field: Yes, Glow: Yes, Number of Dynamic Lights: Normal, Soften Smoke Edges: No, Ragdoll: Yes, Bullet Impacts: Yes, Model Detail: Normal, Water Detail: Normal, Texture Filtering: Trilinear, Anisotropic Filtering: Minimum, Texture, Normal Map and Specular Map Resolution: Normal.

Winner: Last time we ran these tests way back in 2006, the PC dominated at every turn. In an upset, it's now the Mac that blitzes the PC - unless you absolutely have to run Windows, in which case you're better off sticking to the real deal. Perhaps this will change with Windows 7 and 64-bit computing becoming the norm on the PC side, but until then, a Mac does it better.

	Round 1	Round 2	Round 3	Round 4	Round 5	Round 6	Round 7	Round 8
Apple
Asus

Round five: battery life

Will the laptop last until you land?

Anyone who's been on a cross-country flight knows the desperation that comes after your laptop battery dies: suddenly your activity choices consist of watching a tepid in-flight movie or flipping though the duty free catalogue.

We timed how long the MacBook Pro's and Asus U80V's batteries lasted while playing an XviD movie with all power-saving features turned off, and screen brightness and volume set to maximum. All wireless radios were left on, to create a gruelling battery test in which the victor would clearly emerge.

Take in mind this is a particularly stressful test: you'll get considerably longer out of both machines by leaving the power-saving options on, and doing less arduous tasks like web browsing.

Winner: Under our torturous battery test, the MacBook takes it, despite having a battery rated at 2-Watt hours less.

	Round 1	Round 2	Round 3	Round 4	Round 5	Round 6	Round 7	Round 8
Apple
Asus

Round six: software

What can you do with it?

No matter what laptop you buy, you'll get a web browser, a media player and a few simple programs (calculator, text editor and the like) bundled with the operating system. But most manufacturers add in a few more apps - ranging from antivirus to disc burning to productivity suites - to their software bundle so that you can get to work (or play) right away.

Your average PC laptop, on top of the functionality offered with Windows Vista, is usually chock full of trial software, Internet Explorer toolbars and annoying things that have over time, attained the name "crapware". The U80V subscribes a little to this: trial versions of Norton Internet Security 2009 and Microsoft Office 2007 are installed, and Google's toolbar is shoehorned into Internet Explorer. It's not all doom and gloom though - it also comes bundled with the excellent Picasa for image viewing and sorting, and CyberLink's Power2Go for burning CDs and DVDs.

Asus also value-adds by including ExpressGate, a Linux-based OS that allows you to avoid Windows and boots within seconds, for when you want to do basic things like web browse, chat on Skype or IM, play music or view photos. It's a nice added extra, but we suspect most people won't use it.

Windows laptops that include Vista also feature a recovery partition, which means if everything goes pear shaped you can at least re-install your OS and start from scratch. This doesn't protect against hardware failure though, and vendors tend not to include Windows install DVDs, so you'll definitely want to run the vendor's included DVD backup utility to create these.

It's worth noting Microsoft's Live Essentials too, which it stripped out of Windows and then made available for download. The combination of the new Movie Maker and Photo Gallery for Windows Vista and 7 is a clear attempt to battle Apple's iLife suite, while separating it out of the OS avoids annoying the EU. Still, the software isn't bundled with the laptop, and is probably unfair to include it as part of our overall judgement.

Apple, on the other hand, includes its entertainment and productivity software with the laptop. At the time of writing, our MacBook Pro 13 came preloaded with the excellent Mac OS X 10.5.8 and iLife 08, but as of 28 August 2009 all MacBooks will ship with OS X 10.6 and iLife 09.

iLife 08 includes iPhoto (for organising and browsing your digital photos), iMovie (for basic video editing and film capture, which combined with iDVD allows you to create DVD movies), GarageBand (a multi-track music creation and podcasting tool) and iWeb (for website creation). It also features MobileMe Web Gallery, and if you have a MobileMe account, you can upload pictures and videos to it through the application.

While there's no recovery partition here, Apple always includes a DVD of OS X for the purpose of getting your machine back on track should things go terribly wrong. It even boots OS X as a live environment, allowing you to recover data or perform tasks on your current installation where necessary, and for the power user, the Unix-based command line is pure win.

Winner: if you include the Live Essentials, the battle here is closer than it has been for a long time. But out of the box the MacBook Pro, which includes hundreds of dollars of equivalent PC software, easily takes the round.

	Round 1	Round 2	Round 3	Round 4	Round 5	Round 6	Round 7	Round 8
Apple
Asus

Round seven: warranty and support

Who's got your back?

It's all fun and games, until something breaks.

It's impossible for us to judge the quality of service when it comes to interaction with support staff, timeliness and responsiveness, indeed, this will change from customer to customer. But we can look at what support infrastructure surrounds each product.

Asus covers parts and labour for two years under pick up and return, but its battery warranty doesn't extend past the first year. Asus supplies updates, manuals, software downloads and support on its website, and if you sign up as a member you'll be able to post on its support forum as well. If you register your product you'll be considered a VIP member, but it seems all this does is give you quick links to the support, forum and download pages relevant to your product.

Phone support is through 1300 278 788, Monday to Friday, 9am-6pm for hardware and tech trouble shooting - the former for questions about the device, the latter for when you have problems.

By comparison, Apple provides a much stingier one-year warranty, with 90 days of phone support on 1300 321 456. It provides an excellent support database on its website, as well as manuals, software updates and downloads, an active community forum is present and helpful, and you can even check the progress of a repair. If you're near an Apple Store, you can make use of its "Geniuses", who can assist with any technical query or issue.

To upgrade to three years (including phone support) costs an offensive AU$419 for the MacBook Pro 13 - which is at least better than any other MacBook Pro that weighs in at AU$579 extra.

Winner: While Apple provides a deeper and more helpful support mechanism than Asus, the huge price to extend to a decent warranty term cripples it. On paper, Asus has the upper hand.

	Round 1	Round 2	Round 3	Round 4	Round 5	Round 6	Round 7	Round 8
Apple
Asus

Round eight: price

The contenders hit where it hurts: your wallet.

Judging products strictly on price is a sticky proposition. Sure, the lowest price is a compelling selling point, but value (aka 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 similar components. From that perspective, the Asus U80V significantly undercuts the price tag on a MacBook Pro configured similarly, at AU$1999 versus AU$2399 - and another AU$419 on top of that to get the AppleCare plan that gives you three years warranty instead of one.

Winner: On price tag alone, the Asus U80 dominates.

	Round 1	Round 2	Round 3	Round 4	Round 5	Round 6	Round 7	Round 8
Apple
Asus

The winner is...

On raw numbers alone, Apple has it, at five rounds to three. A few mitigating factors will steer users away though: Asus hurts Apple considerably on the price front, managing to hit the sub-AU$2000 mark, which has huge appeal. While the MacBook Pro does come with 4GB RAM, to compete against Asus' warranty you'll need to shell out an extra AU$419, making the Apple an AU$700 more expensive machine. To spec out the U80V with another 2GB of RAM will only cost around AU$50 by comparison, although the user will have to install it themselves. The lack of ExpressCard in the MacBook Pro also hurts its potential for expandability.

Needless to say most people are either in the OS X or Windows camp, precious few are platform agnostic. If you need a Windows machine, you should buy a Windows machine, it'll give you better performance than the Boot Camp equivalent running off the Apple. If you're OS X-based but also price sensitive, then you can get a cheaper MacBook Pro at AU$1899, with a slower processor at 2.26GHz, 2GB RAM and a 160GB hard drive. Given the performance numbers we've found, the processor downgrade probably won't hurt too much, but the smaller hard drive will punish users in today's rich media environment.

For now though, if you're thinking of going Apple, the MacBook Pro 13 presents a compelling case. We look forward to running the numbers once more with Snow Leopard and Windows 7 shortly, in the never-ending platform fight of Mac versus PC.

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