I'm shopping for a laptop. I spend a lot of time codin' with my current [graciously-lent] laptop in my lap. Opinions and advocacy are welcome.

Genre of OS: x86 laptops are, as always, solidly under the foot of MS. But Apple is going in a Unix direction; I'm starting to find this attractive. jcv has pointed out that it'd be valuable to have a commercially-supported Unix for which widely-distributed applications are available. (Heckle him for such a non-open-source-advocate statement.) But if the good stuff is available for OS X -- gcc+binutils, NFS support, under-the-hood OS access -- then it really does sound viable.

Worst-Case OS: If I got an x86 laptop, I'd immediately jump to the worst case: Install Linux, and derive almost no value from the installed OS. If I got an Apple, then I might actually be able to make use of the installed OS; and, in the worst case, I could use Linux. I think cmiller has said that he'd go with an Apple laptop with plans to use his Linux.

Target market: I don't like the fact that Apple's typical marketing for about a decade was the dumb computer users. OTOH, this implies that the alternative is overly complicated; and, frankly, it is, in the same way that an irrational lab manager is complicated.

Boredom: I've been using x86 for a while, and it hasn't surprised me in a while. Thusly, Apple's PowerPC platform is attractive for the newness of it.

Teams: John Crawford of Intel got his MS in CS from my team, but he's not working in IA32 any more. (It's funny that Intel describes him as a "new college graduate" when he joined Intel, when actually he had had a BS for several years before joining Intel.) In the PowerPC camp, I know a guy who designs parts of the PowerPC chip core here in the triangle (Howdy, Wayne!), so maybe I should throw in my lot with him.

Case material: Do those Titanium-composite cases really add any utility? Nearly every laptop I've ever owned or used or seen used has suffered some sort of minor case trauma; in theory, it would seem that the metal case might help protect the innards. But is a bent case superior to a cracked case? The metal-case models (both x86 and Apple) seem to cost about $500 more than the closest plastic-case models.

Lack of a source: I'm not sure where to shop for laptops any more.