international nut of pastry - I think this lines mostly filler.

Audioslave (or RATM for that matter) was never good, and Linkin Park in recent years... but tastes aside

A fair few ppl I know either have Macbooks, or want one. Everyone who's got one has been really happy with it, especially so if they bought a Macbook Pro.

If you want to save a few hundred dollars, Apple sell refurbished ones with warranty through their web store, and keep an eye out around your local universities and such for equipment, either professional or personal, being sold.

I'd be hesitant about buying one sight-unseen second hand (such as via postage on eBay), but something like the newspaper or online classifieds where you can "try before you buy".

And you can always goto Myer and play around with the demo models, if you want to see how things work

I also have the issue of wanting a laptop, just for cool factor or occasional use, want something cool, but don't want to drop $1500 (or $3000) on a MB or MBP.

You could get a fancy cheap UMPC, like the upcoming Asus EEE, which is actually what I hope to do if they're reasonably priced (AU$500-600), and the OLPC project just went public for US$400 as well.

Alot of manufacturers are also offering really nice laptops for quite low prices these days. Personally, I'd stay away from the cheap HP, Acer, etc offerings, but the Dells you can get for AU$700-900 are amazing value.

Dunno how you'd go running OSX on one of them (fairly x86 new hardware has limited/no driver support), but you can theme Linux up to look fairly OSX-ish. For GNOME, the T-ish control and border theme, OSX icons, and Avant Window Nagivator can give you an attractive and useable desktop.

God I sound like a salesman I personally prefer something I can cheaply run Ubuntu on, and usually like cheap underdog systems I have to hack a bit to get working how I want, but have no particular Macfag/Winfag/Linfag hate for other sytems. I just like good quality products.