Vista

Atoms rock.

And slow, and ugly, and with tiny screens and keyboards.

Err yes... except that none of those manufacturers has a laptop weighing

The Lenovo X61 eighs nearly 2Kg is twice as thick as the Air and has a tiny 12in screen and it's slow and fugly.

The Sony TZ150n is slow, fat and fugly with an 11in screen and a 1.1GHz Core2 processor but it does have an optical drive.

The Fujitsu Q2010 is slow, fat and fugly with a 12 in screen and a

Still keep going you're going to get it right some time. perhaps.

They're a great platform, but they can get really sluggish in daily use.

Some of my VB spreadsheets are a real PITA to use.

Apple 1.36 kg, Tosh 0.773kg. Heavier?

And if you compare the lower models it's not as big a gap. Apple have identified a unique market for a machine with minimal IO, minimal comms and a thin edge that makes it look and feel smaller than it is. Toshiba and Sony realise that there's a market for a premium product with all the features. The tosh is £68 dearer than the Apple if you get it without the optical drive, and is smaller in every dimension, and has more ram, and only gives away on the CPU speed.

There's not an apple that slow and with that little memory either. You're talking about single core Atom based s*it running at creaking clock speeds.

Speccing a Core2 duo SFF PC to the same spec as a Mini results in (quelle surprise) a larger box and a higher price.

A 17" MBP isn't a run of the mill "portable device". FWIW, the only Sony VAIO that I've had self-destructed when the screen simply came off in my hand. No need to drop it, it was simply s*it with hinges made of tinfoil.

Hardly.

The simple fact that each new point increment is sold as a new OS and in order to move from, say 10.4 to 10.5, you've got to buy it.

Says the man whose OS is only just going to be introducing 64bit with

Just like moving from 2k to XP to Vista to 7, then.....

Which is the only valid comparison.

There speaks someone who has no clue.

I don't know why where I've never found it priced that high.

You need to be able to do that to be able to run the OS X email client.

Only Apple could find it an achievement to reduce the size of an email client from 300MB to 100MB.

At 300MB for an email client, it wants to be.

Aside from experience of using both systems, and knowing that .x updates of OSX aren't 'service packs', which is essentially what the (free) .5.x updates are.

Vista is less stable and no more functional than XP.

Which is why, given the choice, I'm running XP on my VMware install and netbook.

Must be imagining running all my 32bit software on x64.

Learn something. Even Win2k has it.

Find me some.

You need 4TB to open an email client and a web browser at the same time.

Win2k onwards.

Indeed. It's a lot like Windows Media Player.

No, we just think it's funny. The last laptop I had with one USB port was a Pentium 3 Dell C600.

UAC = User Account Control