I'm assuming most students aren't running or writing finite element codes, simulations, and other computationally intensive programs where more cores and more c

I'm assuming most students aren't running or writing finite element codes, simulations, and other computationally intensive programs where more cores and more clock speed gives you huge gains That's what quad Opteron servers and screen sessions are for, anyhow. An iPhone would provide all the power I need for statistical methodology development (for genome-wide association studies) if I could use effectively use vim on it. I'm thinking of moving up to an EC2 instance or 20 when the Opteron box gets too slow and I figure out how to use the parallel MLEM approach to missing data more effectively. Again, if I could just get a decent keyboard for an iPhone, I'd probably sell my ThinkPad and just use Putty from the windoze boxes at work, and my wife's iPhone (or buy one of my own, since she's always pecking on it now) at home. (Aside: if you're looking to turn a mild-mannered, fashion-conscious, professional woman into a hardcore Internet addict, buy her an iPhone. Now she's complaining that she can't make videos on it and post them to YouTube) The client-side OS is really kind of irrelevant, I don't care whether I'm in Linux or OS X or... well, I do hate Windows, but that's mostly because it gets in the way.