I noticed one important omission in this article: SSDs. All of the recommended laptops had 500GB hard drives. Modern SSDs are an order of magnitude faster than

I noticed one important omission in this article: SSDs. All of the recommended laptops had 500GB hard drives. Modern SSDs are an order of magnitude faster than laptop hard drives in sequential reads/writes and two orders of magnitude faster in random access. Decent SSDs can easily saturate a 6gbps SATA III bus. They have latencies measured in microseconds. They are silent, shock-tolerant, and more energy efficient than hard drives. Once you've switched to an SSD, any laptop with a hard drive will feel broken. Feel free to skimp on everything else when purchasing a laptop, but make sure you shell out the money for a solid state drive.