SUMMARY : Reliable laptops under $1k?

Mon Aug 2 12:19:43 PDT 2004

Quoting Michael T. Halligan (michael at halligan.org):
> Well, after much wrangling back and forth, and a lot of advice heeded from
> this list, I took my wife down to the Apple store. She fell in love with
> the 12" Powerbook, so I bought one off of ebay this weekend, to arrive

Good.  Just bought my mom one from Small Dog this AM.

> tommorrow.  I also bought myself a new 17" to arrive later this week. :)
And the slide begins...

> I was very impressed with the weight, and the width of the keyboard.
> I actually found the powerbook easier to type on than the Thinkpad,
> which to date had been my favorite laptop keyboard layout.  The screen
> is beautiful, with great clarity and acceptable resolution.

And I can add USB devices as I want.  No dock (hello Apple!  Didn't you
come up with the DUO!?)  Old G3-> Keyboard -> trackball -> bitpad.

> If I were to find a problem with the 12" powerbook, it would only be
> that the touchpad isn't as smooth as I'd like it to be. 

> Now, how to squeeze debian onto a powerbook?

Or yellowdog or suse.

Went to fry's this weekend with the GirlF (also an SA).  She's already
got the 17" PB; I fear for it's screen always, but its' not carried
around THAT much and we got a Booqbag for it which doesn't have the
titanium/kevlar shield I wanted, but does have something stiff to block
blows.

Anyway, picked up an IceCAD Macally bitpad.  About 3"x5" work area.
She's an ex-architect and learned system admin being the interface
to some folks they hired to write a CAD system when Calcomp left
the hardware biz.   I can't drive the bitpad, I keep thnking it's
a relative pointer.  *She* spent about 20 seconds getting used to it.

It enables "Inkwell" which lets you write.  An improvement to the
Newton code (egg freckles).   USB and at $50 wasn't minor,but with
an ex-architect - a huge decision.  Pressure sensitive pen means
cool stuff with drawing programs.  I just haven't found nice and
affordable drawing programs for OS X (whither cricket draw?).  Omni
Graffle is passable for network diagrams.

bitpad's pretty cool.