I strongly stick to "The Right to Read". To quote from the old-new thing, the cisco affair:
"I fear the Cisco experience has done unseen damage to Stanford in the form of creating inhibitions against sharing ideas, information and developments with possible commercial value among our groups which have need to benefit from each other's work."
Which is exactly what OSX is going against, with digital restrictions management, the appstore idea and the rest.
Given the choice of windows tax or an outdated intel platform, I'd rather go for this one -- it appears to be the only credible alternative to OS X, supposedly working out of the box with dtrace (w/o arbitrary iTunes sh*) and the rest: all being more or less open. Otherwise you need to rely on good luck with the wifi/suspend/resume/acpi etc.
That is true but to sell a product you need to be solving a problem, and the people having the problem I need Unix on a laptop already have pretty good solutions available.
If you're willing to use Solaris/Linux in VirtualBox on Windows (just run it fullscreen) then all the wireless/power management stuff is already solved too for less money upfront that buying a MacBook, you can just use a cheap Dell.
You have a point: I am very sad to see (and this is not news, I admit), that the problem "The Right to Read" is not perceived as a problem for people. Ten years ago, it was a problem for the ACM community, and imho the problem only got worse with time, because it is becoming latently ubiquitous. Maybe it does have to do with the functional illiteracy, even among the ranks of the highly literate.
You are also right about the cheap Dell: they do have ubuntu, but price/performance pales in comparison to say, Vista. I can only hope, that the Japanese market will embrace this product -- they generally have one of the strongest FreeBSD culture, which might be enough for the kickstart.
