I agree with donikatz. Unless you are doing heavy duty commercial level work using Apple's Pro tools or you are doing huge photoshop images, a MacBook should have plenty of compute power for 70% or more of laptop users. Two caveats
- Max out the RAM (and buy it from someone like Other World Computing or Crucial but not from Apple as they are too proud of their RAM).
- Get the biggest hard drive Apple offers, if you don't need it now, you will need it next year or the year after.
and those are the same caveats I would apply no matter whether your were getting a MacBook, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro.