I dusted off my old (700 MHz PIII) Dell subnotebook running FreeBSD. It reminds me why I like my iBook so much (two trips to AppleCare for repairs notwithstanding).
First, the iBook gets oodles of battery life. With the screen on low brightness (easy on the eyes, especially away from sunlight) and the Airport on, I get over 3 hours on a battery as a matter of course. On my Dell laptop, if it lasts an hour with wireless, it's a long time. (And the screen doesn't vary in brightness all that much). OK, there's not much room on a subnotebook for lots of batteries, and low weight is a selling point, but I'd gladly trade an extra 8-16oz or so for longer battery life.
Second, getting WiFi configured was a bit of a pain. My old DLink 650+ didn't work last year, because FreeBSD didn't support 32-bit CardBus devices, only the older 16-bit PCMCIA standard. (I haven't looked to see if this has changed in the 4.x/5.x kernels.) Doesn't matter that much; I got a cheap, supported 16bit card for about $40, and it works fine. Except that it takes a while to reinitialize after sleep, and configuring the wireless network is a bit hackish. With Airport and MacOS X, not only is wireless configuration seamless, but the network wakes up approximately instantly.
Yeah, yeah, it's not as morally clean as an AMD laptop running Debian, but so what? Hackers are entitled to get the best the whole product experience for their money, just like the rest of the world. Why should we feel the need to punish ourselves with inferior hardware and software simply because there are proprietary bits lurking in Mac OS X?
-Dom
