ideal laptop recommendations?

[Cedric Ware]

> Apple 15" PowerBook w/Superdrive $2,799.00
> -------------------------------------------
> 15.2" TFT screen (1280x854)
> PowerPC G4 1.0 GHz  (Supposedly about as fast as your 2.0 GHz P4s)
[8<]
> Ships with Unix under the hood. :-) I, personally, drool every time my
> co-worker pulls his older 800MHz 15" out of the bag.

Yeah, me too, especially as I've worked on several occasions on a small
G3 iBook and found it adequate if slow.

Except that I ran some benchmarks on a 800MHz G4 PowerBook, which I
tought would be more or less typical for me: compile teTeX-2.0.2 and
use it to typeset some documents; performance was disappointing,
about 42 minutes for teTeX itself (vs. just over 5 on some Dell with
a quarter the RAM and a 1800MHz P4-M), although typesetting took
"only" half again as long as on the Dell.

That's a quite limited benchmark, but it's not encouraging if you
expect performance for a developer's usage.  Nevertheless, these
laptops might be the only ones where everything (APM, video, modem,
Wi-Fi...) works seamlessly while they run UNIX.

				Still hoping someone proves me wrong,
				Cedric Ware.