I'm in secondary school (British equvilent of high school I think), and I've always used a desktop until recently with no problems. I only got the MacBook because then I can take it round to friends houses, work anywhere, ect. I didnt need the protability, but because the MacBook is similar (bar GFX card) to the iMac and MBP in terms of computing power, I got it. I consider my MacBook 1.83GHz with 2GB RAM an upgrade from my PC with a 3GHz Pentium 4 and 512MB RAM.