If you just want to buy, a Powerbook will serve you well. But if you're willing to do a little extra work, I'd buy the ThinkPad. There are a couple ways to lower the price on a ThinkPad:
- Employee Purchase Program discount. This extends to friends, families, and neighbors... you're almost certainly with in 2 degrees of seperation from an IBM employee. Or you can even write their customer service for a guest account. That should knock of 10% before taxes.
- Various other Purchase Program discounts... Student, Shareholders, Visa, Discover, MasterCard, School, etc. Chances are you qualify for at least 5% in discounts and as much as 20% as a student for certain models.
- Buy Certified Used ThinkPads. They're not that much cheaper, but just goes to show that ThinkPads hold their value well (just check out eBay).
- Bill Morrow @ ThinkPads.com (thinkpad reseller and most active/useful thinkpad forum on the net AFAIK) While he might not be able to beat the above discounts, he can almost always beat MSRP and will garantee your satisfaction. He will make sure you have zero dead pixels (a threat with ANY laptop, regardless of who makes it), accept most returns no questions asked, and ship you replacement parts for free.
- Configure your machine with empty bays or missing parts. You can usually find the parts cheaper on eBay. RAM is cheaper from Crucial.com and you will probably want to upgrade that harddrive yourself. For the wireless MiniPCI card, IBM's bios blocks out other cards, but you can download a hack to remove the block (or just buy the Intel or IBM card).
- Finally, if you're a little shady, during the first 30 days of ownership, call customer service and request replacement parts (and recovery discs). They'll Next Day them to you free of charge. Keep these for yourself in case you damage your machine or sell 'em on eBay to get more value out of your machine... either way you're saving.
