My boss bought me a LunchTrayDeluxe (PBG417) back in May for work. It is not as fast as the high-end Wintel hardware, but it is very useable. That screen is such a dream. Being able to carry it around is not as much of a problem as you'd think (I bring it home every night). It's just over 6 lbs and with a good case it has held up well. Did I mention the screen? 1440x900 may not be as nice as 1600x1200, but watching DVD's with almost no black bands above or below is pretty amazing. The article mentioned that it had two trackpad buttons - no, just one. Ctrl-click is equal to 2nd button (I have scroll mouse at work and freeware turns trackpad into scroll wheel). Article failed to mention that in the dark, a backlight under the keys adjusts to light them up so you can type in the dark. Wonderful. Did I mention the screen on this thing? Toshiba released a 10-lb 17 incher - what's the point - just buy a desktop - it's not going anywhere. The LunchTrayDeluxe is truly portable despite its width.

OS X is pretty good. Of course when you don't do the UNIX stuff (cron scripts and permissions repairs) it can really bog down - but I love that I never have to restart this thing. Under OS X this thing loses about 1% of battery life per 1 hour of Sleep. With normal use, I can push about 4 hours with the battery unless I'm on wireless (802.11b/g) where I only get about 2.5 hours of work. Turning the monitor brightness down does less than you'd think. Fan rarely comes on - the heat dissipation on the bottom is good (okay, it's not fair since there is extra width, but there is no extra depth as compared to the 15-inch Titanium PBG4).

It's a great machine (did I mention the screen?) and probably overpriced. But much of the hardware expenditure goes toward having peripherals work seamlessly and not have to worry about the problems of the Windows world (viruses, etc). I'm sure someone other than Toshiba will make a portable 17-inch laptop and then you guys can finally live in the uptopia that I am looking at right now!

Peter