A month or so back I bought my ladyfriend an IBM T42p laptop to use for grad school. I tried without success to sell her on the Powerbook; she's studying architecture, and the absence of MacOS versions of AutoCad and FormZ makes it a non-starter.

No matter, I suppose - I'm not the one who has to use it. But the experience has made me realize how spoiled I've already become in my few months as a returning Apple customer. The IBM lowlights so far include:

• Painful Ordering Process. For some reason, they charged my card in installments. The third installment tripped my bank's fraud alarms, which stopped payment. It took three phone calls to get it all sorted out. The ordering website is ugly. Even their invoices are ugly - looks like it came out of a Selectric typewriter. Miles apart from the smooth and stylish buying experience I had at apple.com.
• NO SOFTARE MEDIA IS INCLUDED! IBM laptops apparently don't come with any kind of software CDs; rather, the hard drive has a very secret partition which can somehow be used to reinstall windows and the bundled software in an emergency. I guess they just didn't consider the possibility that the drive might sieze up, or that I might actually want to use those 9.2 gigs for something else. An irritated phone call later and a set of restore DVDs were promptly shipped out to me, but they should have just been in the box. And I'm still trying to figure out how to reclaim those 9.2 gigs mystery space on the drive - Partition Magic isn't having any of it.
• Bizarre Battery. The battery is shaped such that part of it projects almost an inch beyond the back of the laptop. This makes it impossible to fit it in most standard laptop bags without taking the battery out. Why?
• Software Extras. IBM includes its own WIFI softare that does not play nice with XPs built-in networking. They're both pretty bad. I can't figure out which is worse, but it's irritating that I have to figure out which one I'm supposed to use.
• Fit, Finish, Design. This machine is just ugly. There is no other word for it. The keyboard just feels cheap and crappy. I want to smash the big superfluous 'Access IBM' button that opens a web page.

The screen is very nice and the battery lasts a long time. That's about the only nice thing I have to say.

OMG, this is so 1993 - I sound like a total Mac snob again.