I’ve just bought my first laptop. No, of course it isn’t the first laptop that I’ve used: over the last 13 years* I’ve worked with countless systems from various vendors (IBM, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Sharp, Apple, and Acer) in a variety of form factors (from desktop replacements to pocket-sized subnotebooks). But all of them – even the little Toshiba Libretto – were bought by Sun for me to use, and their hard disks have been filled with the documents, software, tools, and other materials that I work with on a daily basis.
As I spend a lot of my time travelling, I find that my laptop does double duty. Yes, it’s a business tool – but it’s also where I transfer digital photographs when my camera is full; where I store the music that I listen to on the road; and how I watch DVDs in the airport or in my hotel room. This is simply a practical matter: I’m hardly going to carry two laptops with me, one for work and one for personal use. But as a result I’ve found recently that more and more of the hard disk space on my laptop was being occupied by personal materials – music, videos, photographs, DVD projects – that have nothing to do with Sun.
So what was I to do? I’m committed to helping my colleagues to make Solaris 10 an excellent laptop OS (for which I use my Acer Ferrari), but I have to recognize that my personal multimedia data is tied to Apple’s iLife application suite. 
So I started to think about getting myself a laptop for both work and personal use. This principled approach was nudged along by practical considerations: my existing PowerBook (a 12″ 867MHz G4 with 640MB/60GB) was starting to feel really slow: start-up time for some of the big apps like NeoOffice/J was getting painful.
So this evening I visited the Apple store up the road and paid in cold, hard plastic for the first laptop I’ve owned: a 15″ PowerBook (1.67GHz G4, 1GB/80GB). The migration tool worked perfectly: I strung a Firewire cable between the old Powerbook (“medieval”) and the new (“silk”), rebooted medieval in target disk mode, and it sucked everything over – user info, documents, applications, network settings.
And yes, I did buy AppleCare extended warranty. Nobody’s perfect.
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* I think that the first was an IBM Thinkpad 700, back in 1992.