Do Apple iBooks Make Good Geek Laptops?

Curious Geek asks: "I'm in the market for a good, cheap laptop. Primarily I'm looking for something that is relatively rugged, has a LONG batter life, and that is *nix friendly. I'd primarily use it for Perl, PHP and Java coding either on client sites, in front of the TV, or on the train. It would also be nice if I could run dummy websites from it and let it take care of customer invoicing (again, this is all going to be Perl/PHP/Apache stuff) At the moment, the best bet looks like an apple iBook, it has a 5 hour battery life, ships with OS X (although I could use mac linux or YDL) and is rugged enough that loads of spotty yoofs have been given them at school. It also has the ability to house an internal wireless LAN card, which is pretty groovy. Can anybody recommend anything better? My price range is limited ~$1400 USD. I know that for that price I could get an X86 laptop - but do any of these have a battery life as good as the iBook?"

Comments

Affirmative

[psyconaut]

I bought a G4 TiBook a few months back for similar reasons. I'm a UNIX guy who occassionally does some stuff in Dreamweaver or Photoshop.

A G4 and MacOS/X have served me well. I would suspect that an iBook will serve you equally well (the 12" version is heavily used by some road warrior journalists I use, they love the battery life, size and ease of use).

Oh, and MacOS/X has Perl, PHP and Apache already installed...which is kinda nice (although many will install later versions themselves, I'm sure).

Enjoy.

-psyconaut

P.S: Previously I had a Sony VAIO XG-19...which was rather expensive and elaborate at the time of purchase. I'd say I like the Powerbook more.