In the last three years my primary machines have run OS X, Linux, Windows, OS X, and now Windows again, in that order. The observant reader may note, "That's a lot of machines in three years." It is, but I also changed jobs twice in that time frame, so that's part of it. Another part is that I'm a bit rough with laptops; the two mac machines broke badly enough that AppleCare told me they weren't going to help. The Dell and Lenovo machines, though, outlasted my use of them. For this most recent machine, I had several requirements and several nice-to-haves, some of which were in tension. Requirements: Able to drive a 30" external monitor At least 8GB of RAM At least 1440x900 native resolution Nice to have: Smaller than my 15" macbook pro, which is too large to use comfortably in coach on an airplane Larger screen than my wife's 13.3" mbp A "real" cpu, not the underclocked ones in the Macbook Airs A graphics card that c...