lots and lots of misinformation here...
1) Macbooks start at $1,000 (1,099 actually but apple offers a 10% student discount if that applies)
2) Macbooks are intel based and can run windows both virtually and natively, which pretty much kills any application barrier
3) Welcome to land of the open source - lots of free softwares that can be at her dispense. She will have to take the time to learn them just like any other platform (ie adobe) but they are there.
Now let me list the plethora of benefits you get out of the box for 1,000 dollars over a PC
1) There are
NO known viruses for OS X. The proof of concept ones are flawed, and
NO ONE has yet to produce anything that is self propagaing - hands down its more secure out the box
2) FW800, FW isight camera, gigabit ethernet, built in wifi and bluetooth, and it comes with a remote control, ambient light sensor and back lit keyboard- thjose a lot of times come extra, or with an extra price
3) iDvd, iMovie, iPhoto, iWeb, iComic, etc would cost you several hundreds of dollars in software on the PC side, if not more.
4) Their laptops are covered by an international warranty. Meaning if you bought it in the US, and something broke in Hong Kong, you could still get it serviced. If you had to ship it, it gets shipped overnight express to the repair center and then back to you. Average down time in my experience is 3 to 4 business days, and that is a lot faster for repair over anyone else I have ever experienced. They have AASPs world wide
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304398
Those services, software, and security easily make up for any price difference. I used to work for a huge reseller company on their tech side a few years back and I would repair every single manufacturer we carried (HP/Compaq, Gateway, Sony, Acer, eMachines, Apple, etc). I can tell you right now sony has always had pretty bad service in general. HP/Compaq isn't bad but it doesn't beat Apple's. Here were the average turn around times when we shipped laptops off. Sony = 1 month, HP/Compaq/Gateway/Acer = 2 weeks (more like 2.5 weeks), Apple 1 week
Of course I am taking into consideration here that everyone works on a 5 day week instead of 7. Some laptops we could do warranty service on, and other ones had to go back to the manufacturer. So, you make a claim with them and request a box, they ship you a box, you box it up and ship it back. That is the standard process for everyone including the end users. So if you had to ship out your Sony Laptop you probably got it back 3 to 4 weeks later. All the other ones about 2 to 3 weeks, and with Apple you'd get it back in 4 days to a week. Of course there are exceptions (parts out of stock, etc) that may make these results vary. However, this has been my experience while working for this company for 6 years.
Now, Apple has its flaws, I am well aware of that. However, considering everything you get when you purchase an Apple I would say they are fairly priced and in some cases they are a steal compared to some PCs.
