What is on Your Mind?

Having owned a MacBook Pro for a couple of months now, I'd say it's not far behind.

The design and build quality is incredible, and is easily the most robust-feeling laptop I've ever used or seen. It also comes in a 17" model. SSD is an option, albeit an expensive one.

I certainly wouldn't buy a Mac to wipe it for Linux, when you could get other laptops for half the price, or less (if nowhere near as nice looking and robust).

For virtualisation I use VMware Fusion. It has a great feature called "Unity", anomg others (best read about it from their website).

And of course OS X is Unix-based. One key-press and you're in a shell.

Can't beat that

We don't deal with Lenovo at work anymore after two big incidents with them.

1) One of our customers had a Lenovo computer we sold them suddenly die. Flat-out dead, a motherboard problem. The Lenovo support technician actually came out to fix it, announced he had brought all the wrong parts, left, and waited for the warranty to expire before telling them he wasn't bothering to come back. We ended up replacing that computer out of our own pocket.

2) Lenovo once shipped us a laptop formatted with the wrong operating system, Windows 7 Ultimate. The license key stuck to it therefore didn't work. (Came with the wrong restore disk, too.) They refused to correct or even acknowledge their error, we had to reformat with our own Windows 7 disks and buy an extra license key.

most engineers will say toshiba for "hardiness" and long lasting battery. I like toshiba or fujitsu machines but they can get quite expensive.

You have to rely on a local hardware shop that is stunting with OS-less laptops to find a good deal. This is a very rare occurrence these days, even Linux-only laptops are unheard of for a year or two. For the office we purchased a laptop that had no OS, but that was back in the days when 4GB RAM was still the norm.

I bought my Inspiron 1525n from Dell with Ubuntu installed a few years ago. (I promptly wiped Ubuntu and installed Fedora.) Dell rolled out their Linux line with much fanfare years ago, but I think they aren't getting the sales they hoped. It's hard to find a Linux PC on the Dell website by accident.

Very well said! Regardless of weather you are talking about Mac, Windows or even some too-helpful desktop managers for Linux, I too want the PC to do what I say.

The VirtualBox Downloads page has a link for OS X hosts. I think I've heard of others.

But the real question is whether you can run OS X in a virtual machine under Linux on generic hardware. Apple's official policy seems to be NO! Don't even think about it or we'll slap your butt in jail so fast your head will spin! But there are various results from googling that suggest it can be done. If I ever get around to it, that's what I want to do.

Sounds like you are describing the HP EliteBook 8740w Mobile Workstation. I have the 8540w (15.6 inch version) for work. It's okay, I suppose. Can't say I love it.

Thanks! This was an extremely helpful advice! Googling around i found a shop in my vicinity (in german), which sells configurable notebooks, even without OS. Exactly what i wanted.

I configured a 8740w with 16GB RAM, a 128GB SDD and a WUXGA display for ~2600 EUR for me - a lot less than the MacBook Pro (but arguably not as good-looking). I think this one will be the winner.

I will keep you informed about my experience with it if anybody is interested.

bakunin