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The only disadvantage of picking a Mac is that (unless they spring for a Mac Pro) you can't stuff it to the gills with RAM.

Until the latest generation of consumer Macs the limit was 4gb, though now if you spend $500 you can get 2x4gb DDR3 for an iMac or Macbook (though the Macbooks can only address 6gb). In the PC world, you can get 4x4gb DDR2 for a desktop Core2 motherboard for $350, or 6x2gb DDR3 for a new Nehalem motherboard for $240.

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You're doing web development, not building a supercomputer or trying to run your laptop as a high-performance server. That level of RAM is entirely unnecessary on a machine used for dev.

I disagree. Doing web dev, you could easily be running a browser with multiple tabs, web servers, db servers, and a handful of virtual machines all at the same time. The more RAM you have, the smoother it all runs. That is unless you like nice little pauses when you switch apps. If you have a 32 bit system, you should have 3GB if you can. 64 bit, throw in 6 or 8 GB. Memory's cheap.

Buying extra RAM from Apple is for the birds, really. You can buy third party RAM for cheaper and install it yourself, no problem.

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