Surprised to see there are no Apple fans here amongst us 'luxury' BMW owners. To the poster above complaining about Apple costing more than a PC: You do realize your BMW cost more than a Ford too, yet you bought it anyway because it was nicer, right?
I'm no Apple 'fanboy' and have worked in the industry for over 10 years dealing mainly with PCs. However, I would almost never recommend that a casual, non-gaming user (as the OP clearly is) purchase a PC over a Mac. For starters, any PC purchase for a casual user requires Anti-Virus and Anti-Malware software or sooner or later, they will become infected. The same casual user can't easily deal with that infection the way more experienced users can. Apple prevents 99% of all viruses/malware (yes... I know some DO exist) simply because the market share dictates that malicious actors focus more on PC infections. The argument could also be made that Apple's underlying BSD architecture is inherently more secure than anything Windows has ever produced. Couple that with the fact that almost all new Apple laptops come with SSDs, Intel processors (which as you know in almost all cases beat AMD processors in benchmarks on balance), and sufficient RAM. One can easily extend the laptop into a 'desktop' workstation by adding either a thunderbolt display or standard DVI monitor.
Yes, it will cost you more -- but it is worth the money in the end for a product of superior style/quality to most of what Dell/HP/etc produce these days.