I'd go with the Macbook, I had one of the white ones from 2009, thing was awesome. The Core 2 Duo will preform basically the same, if not better than the i3, due to clock speeds, though it's not hyper-threaded. Another reason is build quality, HP's home line-up has never been known for quality. Another thing i forgot to add, though it's not officially supported, You can use 8GB of RAM in the Macbook.