> Second hand plastic ThinkPads are hardly an alternative... They are seriously outdated now.
And how does that affect their day-to-day usability?
I'm a big fan of new and shiny, but my primary laptop is a Dell Inspiron I bought in 2006/2007, because I'm also a big fan of using things until they break. I popped an SSD into it a couple years ago and it is very snappy and performs perfectly well as a development machine, web browser, and (small) VM host. In fact, it's actually snappier than my i7 desktop for most tasks because of the SSD. So why would a secondhand (and probably newer) ThinkPad not be a suitable alternative?
The biggest downsides of having an older laptop are that the screen is a mere 1680x1050 and it's pretty thick, probably a around a full inch when closed. The former is still not terrible by today's standards (what's with the absurd popularity of 1366x768?), but I do consider it to fall into the bare minimum of acceptability, and the latter is simply not a problem for me - it's not enough weight to bother me on my daily 1.2 mile walk into work and most of the time it's sitting on a desk or on my lap, not anywhere space-constrained.
