Honestly, if you're serious about doing comsci, learn a unix os like linux or bsd. If nothing else, it'll come in handy when you're doing those 11th hour changes to a C routine that your client forgot to mention was needed(IT WILL HAPPEN!!!). As I've stated earlier, I'm not a mac person, I've used them b4 and for all the mac people around me, os9 was far too unstable and osx, while a quantum leap forward, is very bloated for what it is, an interface for a bsd operating system (iirc darwin). If you do make a move to a "purer" unix system, a PC is nice to have if for nothing more than hardware compatibility. (
"shortcut" in unix)
I can tell you in all honesty, from a cs graduate perspective, that 95-100% of all code you are taught is best run on a unix system. I highly doubt you will be doing anything OS specific and gcc is the preferred compiler for most universities in my experience. Regardless of platform, you won't NEED the processing power of a 2 yr old laptop, let alone any new doohickey that comes out. Benchmarks are useless to you because you'll never have to push any system you get.
If you're going to use your machine to do web design, the most intensive thing you'll need to do is prolly generate a dynamic wireframe or create a flowchart. Web design and web code is all text run on thousand dollar servers anyways so you could prolly hammer on through with a 386 if all you needed was text.
Also, with stability...some people seem to be incorrectly linking hardware stability with software stability. Modern hardware RARELY fails. Software will fail many orders of magnitude more often than hardware. Intel hardware and Mac hardware are inherently stable. Despite the "valiant" efforts of MS to prove otherwise, the x86 architecture is stable. CISC (SISC really doesn't mean anything,it's pretty much just CISC) is stable and efficient. FYI, there are servers throwing out terabytes of data running on first generation pentiums hooked up to vast scsi arrays that don't even flinch regardless of load. So long as you know your OSes and apps, you will run stable...period.
Having said all that, I stand by my previous recommendation to sit tight and figure out exactly what you need and then get that...not to try and anticipate what you might need in the future. College is a different experience for everyone. Getting the spiffy new titanium powerbook might not be a good idea if you find you have a room mate who is not shy of pawning your goods and "borrowing" things because he/she doesn't have one. getting a pc might be premature if you find that you need a lot of ppc tuned apps like illustrator or photoshop. Getting a mac might be premature if you find yourself entangled in a project to create an IE plugin module (trust me, it's not a fun job on a mac).
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