Long battery life, light weight, and most important: fast wakeup and sleep when I close the lid! This is the most important feature to me. I want to open it up, quick jot something down or check something and then close it again. If it locks up or churns for 10 minutes before I can use it, its a non starter. This has so far kept me on Macs.
I agree with this, with the caveat that actually more important is reliability. Our company bought a few Lenovo T60Ps - with how great the T43P had performed, we thought it would be T43P++. Unfortunately the wireless cards were VERY flaky. :(
So, I want: reliability so I don't have to futz with wireless and other functionality - and then instant on and off. "Elastic laptop"
If the biggest caveat is a wireless card, you can probably replace it.
I have a Thinkpad T41, which has been great except the OpenBSD driver for the included wireless card was incomplete (due to being reverse-engineered). It was only about $15 to replace it with a Ralink card; Ralink happily provided full tech specs to the BSD devs, and the card works quite well.
Excellent point. Lucky for me, I haven't ended up with a flaky mac yet so its not on my radar, but I'd certainly have to say that ultra reliable networking, keyboard, pointer and USB would be a must.
It doesn't matter how fast your computer wakes up from sleep if it takes 10 minutes of fiddling to get it back on the network.
My preference here is to not have the machine sleep at all when it's closed. I do more sysadmin type work than local development type work, and having TCP (SSH) sessions end every time you close the lid would drive me bananas. I would have ruined several laptops in the last few months as our 90 pound great dane puppy has run at me while I was sitting in my chair hacking away.
MacBooks (and MBPs) don't make this easy, which (unfortunately) has kept me on PCs. I've mitigated the ten minutes of BS thing by keeping my machines clean, with an agressive attitude toward junkware, and setting the power button to suspend the computer to disk.
I've made the "i'm using you" / "i'm done using you, good night" command an explicit step this way, but after adapting it's actually kind of nice (even faster than mac sleep/wake) and lets you keep your music and remote terminals alive, which can be convenient at times.
I suspend my desktop nightly (which saves about $100/year).
I have SSH sessions to 6 machines: they just run while:; do ssh -t hostname screen -dR. After a resume, a "killall ssh" kills the broken connections and starts a new one which will bring up exactly the same terminal as before, due to screen.
Depending on how long you suspend for the SSH sessions might still work (assuming you get the same IP address, and there's no NAT with short timeouts, and there's no SSH timeout configured).
>> Long battery life
>> Light weight
>> Fast wakeup and sleep
Only thing I'd add is "small". The market may be tilting towards larger computers, but I wouldn't get anything larger than a 13.3 inch computer at this point. 13-inches hits the sweet spot in terms of size and usability. Anything small doesn't feel like a real computer. Anything larger is awkward to use in contained spaces like on airline seats.
I agree. I do most of my work with my desktop anyway, so if I'm going to buy a new laptop I will make sure that it is portable
I once bought a 15.4" heavy Dell laptop, but I ended up not using it because I couldn't be bothered to drag it around. Now the laptop is 100% stationary since it given to my mother to browse the web.
