Laptop Wars 3 - And the Winner is

an IBM -Lenovo Thinkpad z60m. The model I chose is a marginally less powerful (and less expensive) than the one reviewed in the article I linked to, but I have added some goodies like a hot swappable battery. I paid less than 2k $ for a jazzed up to the gills Thinkpad.

The macbook finally lost out because (a)I don't want to pay good money for beta testing apple's new hardware architecture (The G4 powerbook is too underpowered, and (soon to be) abandoned by Apple anwyay, not to mention terrible display issues on some of them which Apple pretends not to notice). (b)reliability issues with a macbook are likely to be life sucking given the atrocious customer service here in India. If I lived in the USA or Europe I may have been more tempted by the macbook.

IBM has excellent customer service in Bangalore and I have taken out a 3 year warranty. (130$ vs 340$ for the macbook). The Thinkpad outmatches the powerbook in sheer ruggedness. Hopefully in a couple of years Apple will have worked the kinks out of their new hardware choices and I will wait till then to drink the Apple Kool Aid.

My new laptop is on its way to my friend (who lives in the USA) and I should get my hands on it in early March and I will post my experiences installing Linux on the new laptop then.