MacBooks (and MBPs) don't make this easy, which (unfortunately) has kept me on PCs. I've mitigated the ten minutes of BS thing by keeping my machines clean, with an agressive attitude toward junkware, and setting the power button to suspend the computer to disk.
I've made the "i'm using you" / "i'm done using you, good night" command an explicit step this way, but after adapting it's actually kind of nice (even faster than mac sleep/wake) and lets you keep your music and remote terminals alive, which can be convenient at times.
I have SSH sessions to 6 machines: they just run while:; do ssh -t hostname screen -dR. After a resume, a "killall ssh" kills the broken connections and starts a new one which will bring up exactly the same terminal as before, due to screen.
Depending on how long you suspend for the SSH sessions might still work (assuming you get the same IP address, and there's no NAT with short timeouts, and there's no SSH timeout configured).
I agree with this, with the caveat that actually more important is reliability. Our company bought a few Lenovo T60Ps - with how great the T43P had performed, we thought it would be T43P++. Unfortunately the wireless cards were VERY flaky. :(
So, I want: reliability so I don't have to futz with wireless and other functionality - and then instant on and off. "Elastic laptop"
I have a Thinkpad T41, which has been great except the OpenBSD driver for the included wireless card was incomplete (due to being reverse-engineered). It was only about $15 to replace it with a Ralink card; Ralink happily provided full tech specs to the BSD devs, and the card works quite well.
It doesn't matter how fast your computer wakes up from sleep if it takes 10 minutes of fiddling to get it back on the network.
Only thing I'd add is "small". The market may be tilting towards larger computers, but I wouldn't get anything larger than a 13.3 inch computer at this point. 13-inches hits the sweet spot in terms of size and usability. Anything small doesn't feel like a real computer. Anything larger is awkward to use in contained spaces like on airline seats.
I once bought a 15.4" heavy Dell laptop, but I ended up not using it because I couldn't be bothered to drag it around. Now the laptop is 100% stationary since it given to my mother to browse the web.
All great points mentioned here. Lightweight; you can get real light these days without being a DR. I love widescreen ever since I bought my new Thinkpad T61p and the poor displays on the Thinkpads are a thing of the past. I highly disagree that Thinkpads are ugly - they're made for efficiency and professionalism, not for show. Linux; my machine came with SLED of which I partitioned for my love of Ubuntu - gotta have Linux for kernel hacking and that obsessive need for ultimate control of your OS.
All that said, I'm a power user and by that I literally mean I handle my laptop ruggedly(and I'm sincerely not a klutz). For this reason I need a Thinkpad for always on the go and durable performance. They take a beating and their customer service(warranty related) is the best in the business. Had many other brands that crapped out after six to eight months on average - Thinkpads last on average three years before I call in for warranty service(high resale value). My T61p is both lightweight, high performance, widescreen, and allows up to 4 GB of RAM, rugged and goes with me everywhere while taking bumps and bruises along the way. Need a new keyboard because your hackin skillz have worn away the home row, space bar and number row? Call in a service ticket and get a keyboard shipped out and arrived to your door in less than two days(Bigtime priority).
Once you go Thinkpad, you never go back, at least for me anyways.
I personally agree about Thinkpads not being ugly (when I made that comment I was referring to my wife's perception of them initially -- now she's a T61p WUXGA convert as well).
I also agree about Thinkpad reliability, but I know the plural of anecdote isn't data, and everyone's mileage varies.
I disagree about the T series weight. The T grew to fill the void left by the discontinued ~7 pound A series. Yes it's lighter but I feel sorry for any floor it might land on... but the computer will most likely survive.
I fancy myself a power / heavy professional user as well: I have a very low tolerance for hardware related BS. I run minimalist installs of the OS of my choice (XP at the moment). I expect to be able to throw my computer around (while off -- I'm not a sadist) and not scuff or break anything. I disable or order machines without gimmick features (Bluetooth is disabled on my T60p, I got one without the fingerprint reader), and I don't use the full (software-integrated) versions of drivers for anything I don't have to.
With this recipe, my Thinkpads have been very faithful to me over the last ~10 years, and Lenovo's going to have to really screw it up to lose me as a customer.
Depending on what you're looking for I'd say that IBM/Lenovo is ahead of even Apple on build quality. In my opinion Apple pushes too hard on fine design (fine lines and edges, thin case designs) where the Thinkpad team designs their machines to take abuse first and foremost.
If you're the type of person who values these properties I believe a Thinkpad should be on your short list.
I care. I have to use the machine(s) every single day, sometimes for hours on end. If it's ugly, I don't want to look at it. Same goes for accessories. It's impossible to find a half decent non-black or pink womens laptop bag (I believe there's a special and separate level of hell just for the color pink, that's how much I hate it). I just stick with nondescript messenger bags, which don't always fit the occasion but oh well.
My black MacBook has an engraved lid (http://flickr.com/photos/chix0r/2490375769/). The biggest benefit is that it sticks out like a sore thumb so I know it's mine, since so many people don't do anything to their MacBooks after getting one. Very convenient when you're in a sea of Apple laptops..which used to happen to me at WWDC but now also happens at pretty much any tech conference nowadays.
It also makes a great conversation starter with lots of people who are very tempted to touch it..everywhere from airport security waiting lines to the apple store and all.
About the only thing I would invest in is at least 1G of ram, maybe even 2G. laptops tend to ship with slower hard drives so if you start swapping you are really going to have problems. maybe benchmark your average ram usage on the desktop.
I've found that processor speed isn't as important as most people think, go light you'll be fine, this isn't a server.
last note. I regret buying a desktop replacement laptop.
edit: when I say make sure it runs linux I mean make sure that it's hardware is compatible with a linux install. That same hardware will work good with windows, and gives you freedom of choice later. Or you can just get linux now because linux rules.
Don't get anything too heavy. Mine's just over 6 pounds, and that's already pushing it.
Finally, don't worry about hard disk space; if you need lots, just grab an external drive; they're cheap these days.
Right now I'm using a 37" 1080P LCD as my home monitor and an X60 as my laptop. I use the LCD to keep various communication tools open and the large LCD for coding/reading.
If you want to code, don't get an Eee PC.
For general hacking, processor speed these days doesn't seem to be an issue...
Take a hard look at your workflow and usage scenarios:
Do you plan on running a lot of stuff at once? Visual Studio or Eclipse use a lot of resources, you'll probably want to spend a bit on a better CPU and more RAM.
If you don't tax computers very heavily, you might be better served spending on a faster disk and skipping the extra RAM. I had a computer with 1G of RAM that I upgraded to 2G. I actually preferred it with 1G because I rarely use 512MB, and I suspend/resume all of the time. Double the RAM doubled my suspend time, and that's kind of annoying.
Consider your budget. Is this a short term discretionary spend or a long term investment for you? I believe that it's better to buy current generation, mid-high grade parts for some key pieces, electing to forego trendy cutting-edge features, if you're planning on holding on to this for a while. If this is a cheap impulse buy, skip the specs and buy the one with the neat bells and buzzers.
How hard are you on your equipment? If you have peers with laptops, especially some older or more used ones, look at the build quality and the things that are going wrong with them. Some laptop manufacturers (HP/Compaq) do stupid things like making the power cable connector L shaped, which makes the cord into a lever when the cable is kicked. This lever prys on the connector's soldering to the motherboard and trashes the computer. Some manufacturers (Dell) make computers that creak and crack and sag as they age. Some manufacturers (Toshiba) make the laptop lid position switch cheap and unreliable, which makes the LCD flicker when the screen is open. Some manufacturers (IBM / Lenovo) make computers that are tough and reliable but are so ugly you wish they'd die so you can get something else. Some manufacturers (Apple) make computers with such fiddly fit and finish that any service, even by a trained professional, will cause the seams and gaps to not be perfect anymore, which will annoy you because you paid a premium for all of that fit and finish.
For myself I prefer full processors (no Celerons), discrete graphics cards (perhaps passing on the current nVidias that are all failing right now), sufficient (but not more than that) RAM, the fastest hard drives I can afford, and the highest resolution screens available (1900x1200, particularly in a 15", is what I prefer). With this formula you generally have decent parts for things you don't normally upgrade (CPU), and you don't blow your budget on things that can be upgraded later for less (max RAM, larger capacity HD).
I sold it, and bought a thinkpad x60, and get over 6 hours of battery life (4-5 hours under heavy load). I love that I can basically use it all day without worrying about battery.
Pretty much any machine has a fast enough cpu for the kind of work I do - ram seems to be the big bottleneck now. (virtualization + firefox + emacs + python + sbcl + ... all take their toll).
things that can render a laptop unusable:
- poor display, keyboard, or wireless card; excess fan noise or heat.
nice to have: fast Core 2 Duo, minimum 2G RAM, if you're doing lots of compiles, spidering (DOM tree extraction), database indexing, anyting that pegs CPU's for more than a couple minutes.
like everybody else, my first choices would be macbook or Macbook pro/ Vmware fusion/ Windows XP and ubuntu, or thinkpad with XP/grub/ubuntu (i don't think you can buy them with XP pre-loaded anymore). Toshiba, Dell, HP still sell XP pre-loaded (the "downgrade option") Macbook is only model < $1800 that has DVI out, which makes a big difference
Toshiba satellites aren't bad, mine's been reliable for 3 years. Read the amazon reviews.
(Joking aside, I refuse to work on anything else any more, life's too short to fight your OS)
The other thing you really want is silence. And battery life.
Even if you code a lot, CPU speed is rather irrelevant. Any Core2Duo will do (dual core and 64Bit are great to have). But RAM, you can't have enough -- and since it is cheap at the moment, don't bother and directly upgrade to 4G.
For me, this is a MacBook, but there are plenty of alternatives. For example, the FSC Lifebook series is really great. If possible, look for those business-offerings. They tend to use a little older but more reliable hardware, which can really save your day and will most certainly enable you to run linux.
Spec wise, I'm running on a Macbook Pro 2006 model with a Core Duo 1.86Ghz processor and 2GB of ram, and I'm doing great. I'm sure one of the latest models with a C2D 2.4GHz CPU would be a bit faster, but I don't do anything too intensive (light photoshop is probably the limit of my number crunching apps). So pretty much anything you buy today (except the ultra-budget machines, of course) will suit you for your needs. Just make sure you have a nice amount of ram! :)
Blew away the default XP install for Heron. Had to fidget with some packages and the kernel a little to get it all going smoothly. Not too bad.
What sold me on it was the ergonomics (keyboard's perfectly usable, 10.2" screen) and the portability (5 hours of battery with continuous use; I let it sleep when I wasn't using it and went all day on a single charge).
The goal was to have the laptop on me at all times so I can get work done anywhere.
