Even better is a Thinkpad running some flavor of GNU/Linux. They're well supported because well, frankly, they're incredible machines and hackers everywhere love them.

For people trying to run a Thinkpad with Linux i can recommend ThinkWiki (http://thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki).

It helped me alot in setting up my ThinkPad.

Back to the original Question: IMHO Thinkpads are very good and especially reliable Notebooks, but they also aren't cheap. When getting a Thinkpad then a T-Model most of the others don't differ that much from Notebooks sold by HP or Dell.

Our company has been using ThinkPads for years. In the past year standard issue has been T60p and T61p — and they're awful.

Crappy display drivers, a tendency to shut down when you plug them in or dock them, etc. etc.

We're switching to HPs now.

Me, I'm on my second MBP in 3 years and I'm happy. Another friend of mine just replaced his MacBook with a MBP, because it just wasn't quite keeping up.

I have a Thinkpad X41 Tablet that I really like. It was part of the very last product cycle to be branded IBM. Lots of people say that quality has gone downhill since then.

I owned a T42 and now a T61p. Even tough the build quality hasn't improved speaking of it having gone downhill is drastically exaggerated. The quality is comparable between the two, the nice little ideas still exist (like the keyboard light etc.) the only real change I saw was that i had to loosen 4 screws to extend the memory instead of four :-)

But one person probably isn't truly a reference... So more references are needed.

Which leads to the question.. What type of laptop will all the hackers buy if Lenovo doesn't pull things together soon?

Get both.