If you want a reasonably new laptop for $800 or less, it won't be a Mac. (I'm not a hater, I'm typing on one now, that's just the way they are. And I hate that

If you want a reasonably new laptop for $800 or less, it won't be a Mac. (I'm not a hater, I'm typing on one now, that's just the way they are. And I hate that statements like that need to be justified.) HP is far and away the most common brand in our shop, and many of them for the results of design defects. HP has taken to cutting the wrong sorts of corners; they're using cheap foam thermal pads on their GPUs, no shock bumpers on their hard drive mounts, that sort of thing. The battery life you're looking for will probably mean a smaller screen size, not much bigger than 15". http://dealnews.com/ http://dealnews.com/ has a pretty OK-looking Dell Latitude for $697: http://dealnews.com/Dell-Latitude-Core-i7-Dual-2.66-GHz-16-LED-Laptop-for-697-free-shipping/391613.html http://dealnews.com/Dell-Latitude-Core-i7-Dual-2.66-GHz-16-L... -- Core i7 is real nice, although that'll have an impact on your battery life. I don't see anything there that Linux should have trouble with, and we've had pretty good experiences with Dell so far, especially given their price. I've had my eye on an MSI lately, but Lenovo is still a really good bet when it comes to reliability: http://dealnews.com/Lenovo-Z560-Core-i5-Dual-Core-2.53-GHz-16-Laptop-for-649-free-shipping/391607.html http://dealnews.com/Lenovo-Z560-Core-i5-Dual-Core-2.53-GHz-1... -- Core i5 at a slightly lower speed should give you a little better battery life, and Lenovos are typically fairly reliable and Linux-compatible. Oh, and if you can scare up the extra cash for it, replace your hard drive with an SSD as soon as you can. Your disk space will suffer (badly), and it'll cost a lot, but it'll save you a fair bit of battery life and you'll be thankful for it the first time you drop your laptop. My laptop travels all over the place with me all the time, and despite having to suffer with only 32G of disk space, the SSD in it has saved my butt more times than I care to count.