My laptop has a 12.1 inch screen at SXGA+ resolution (1400x1050 vs. 1366x768 for WXGA) so I don't think this is the 12 inch screen you are familiar with.

Troll.

The X61 has excellent [notebookreview.com] reviews [tabletpcreview.com], infact I own one myself. Under "light" use (and I'm sure that Excel falls under light use), I can get 7 hours out of the battery with wireless enabled, if I'm watching XViD with VLC I can get about 4 hours out of the battery.

The hard disk is not slow at all, I'm running Windows XP and boot time is under a minute on the machine and is sufficient for most tasks.

Seriously who needs a VGA, and a PS/2 port on their laptop nowadays?

Lots of people need VGA out to hook up to projectors. Also, that's not a PS/2 port. Judging by the pin configuration, I'm guessing it's an S-Video out or something, for attaching to TVs, etc.

You're missing the point, the people looking for an ultraportable notebook wouldn't even consider a model with a 15.4" screen, heck 13" is pushing it. While of course you could find a 15.4" model from Dell (or just about any other vendor) for under a grand, you can be gauranteed those things will weigh at least over 5lbs. The ultraportable notebook market targets people who carry a notebook with them all day and don't want something that will weigh them down or be cumbersome to open. What they want/need is something that you won't even notice you're carrying, that can be opened on a plane even when the jerk in front of you is fully reclined, something with enough battery to get you through your last sales call.

I agree that $1800 is way too much to spend, but the fact of the matter is all the modern models that are under 3lbs cost around that range. Personally, when I needed a ultraportable, I bought a 2.6lb Portege 2000 for about $200 from eBay last year, and while it's by no means a powerful machine by today's standards, it has more than enough power for most people's ultraportable needs. It's a P3 750 w/ 256MB RAM, and it runs Fedora Core 6 with Fluxbox amazingly fast. The places I use this laptop, I wouldn't even consider bringing my 14.1" D610, and anything larger would be out of the question. At the same time, if I was doing CAD or art, or many other types of work, there'd be no point for a laptop this small or slow, and those larger models become really attractive.

PS 2.0?

Excuse me, but on MacOSX, we use openGL and fragment shaders. None of this DirectX stuff, thankyouverymuch.

Informative? Who did that? My X61 has a 7200rpm drive (last time I checked it was not slow) and my 4-cell (that doesn't stick out the back) lasts me 4-4.5 hours on average.

Mod THAT as informative!

the harddrive makes a huge difference in battery life. i had an HP laptop a few years back, and i went from 4200rpm to 7200rpm. it was super fast, but my battery life went from 2-2.25hrs to 45min.

The reason most laptops come with a 5400 RPM (or even 4200 RPM) hard drive is not to save money, but to conserve battery life. Yes, it does make a difference.

This is really a series question. I am an engineer not a laptop expert. Assuming the Sony, Dell, and Lenovo are in similar price range, why the would anyone spend $1800 for a laptop that probably has MicroCrap Vista installed? Are people seriously so stupid that they would buy a computer with the most horrible excuse for an operating system when they could have OSX, and better engineered hardware? I understand some that people are stupid but what the FUCK? I believe OSX is UNIX based which should be end of comparison and has stuff like SSH, telnet, ping, c, c++, java, bash, perl, python, ruby, tcl and a really good window system. Vista has that stupid fucking paperclip that pops up when you type, Seriously WTF? What excuse would an intelligent person have for buying a MicroCrap laptop for a higher price than Mac?