Early September 2001, I bought an Apple iBook, and am so far quite pleased with it. Seems to be the best thing going in notebooks at / near this price ($1500 for the midgrade model -- with DVD player -- as of purchase time), though recent months have seen some interesting and cheap Intel notebooks. Mac OS X is quite nice, but the stock 128MB is not enough to run it well. I intend to run Linux Mandrake (or Mandrake Linux, as the case may be) on this iBook as well, probably starting with version 8.2, since they're evidently skipping the 8.1 iteration for PPC.

There are a lot of things wrong with the iBook, but a less overwhelming number of things than are wrong with most notebooks, because it has a decent latch mechanism so far (hope it lasts -- the magnetic swinging latch is genius.), side-mounted DVD-drive (front mounted DVD drives are plain stupid), bright 1024x768 screen (livable though not high-end nowadays), and decent battery life. The pulsing power light is good, too. However (and again, these apply to a lot of notebooks):

• The keyboard, while better than many laptops', is far inferior to that of an IBM Thinkpad. (And I've managed to remove my delete key, a little too literal for my taste. The plunger still works, but it sure feels worse than having a real key there.)
• Speaking of keyboard, I find the on-keyboard eject button for the DVD drive very unresponsive. I sometimes have to press it several times, or hold it down, to get a response. This should instead be a button on the side that looks similar to but different from the power button.
• And still speaking of keyboards, my biggest complaints are more fundamental than how the keys feel or whether the DVD drive button is on teh keyboard or not: the biggest problem is placement of keys. Apple is one company which tries to be on the edge of intelligent, comfortable, human-oriented design: Why then does it continue to outfit laptops with straight rows of keys, and offer nothing but the QWERTY arrangement? How about a) a more ergonomic key layout (at least *some* built in hand-friendly curvature of the rows of keys, please) and b) a switch somewhere not too deep that would select at least one alternate key layout, like Dvorak.
• Caps lock ought to be banished somewhere harder to accidentally press if not thrown completely out. How often is caps lock handy? Why should it be nearly as large as my shift key, and larger than tab? It shouldn't. get rid of it and make my shift key larger.
• The power supply is external. Wish it had a jack for a hospital cord instead, like far too few notebooks have been designed for. At least the power supply is international, but where can I buy more localized cords to take to Germany or England? I hate adapters.
• It would have been easy to make the iBook more customizable in the way that the Powerbook 1400 had a clear panel to put pictures etc into. (Thanks to everyone who pointed out which model I was thinking of.)

  Now I've seen at least one modded iBook (painted purple inside -- not my aesthetics, but still a proof of concept), but I'm not yet brave enough to void my warranty, or more importantly, risk breaking the thing.

• Despite all the mice and men at work, there are a lot of things quite unintuitive about the Mac OS. This is not a complaint confined to the Mac OS -- *no* OS is intuitive. But I'd like to the Location Manager control panel specifically to be a little saner. Currently, it seems to lose all my settings whenever I change locations, and I have to enter the settings all back in by hand ...
• no audio-in jack (must buy a separate doohickey) is ridiculous.Granted, that doohickey isn't too expensive but it adds another necessary yo-yo to this "all in one" machine. And though I say "necessary" I still haven't bothered to get one, partly because I resent the need for it. Likewise for the TV out. I shouldn't need $50 in ugly cables to put sound in and video out when the machine is otherwise ready for those things.
• No network activity light. What I'd like is a trio of network lights in different colors (perhaps green, blue and yellow) to indicate traffic on the modem, ethernet port, or wireless. Maybe a 4th color (orange?) as a catchall for other kinds of network activity, like ethernet via USB or firewire, or who knows what the future will bring ... these lights should be visible even when the case is closed, so the machine could be used as a server, and could encode more information than "there's traffic" by blinking in interpretable patterns.
• Airport card should be built in. Apple had built-in SCSI before "normal" people had heard of SCSI, and that was probably more radical. Apple: Please announce that *all* your products from now on will be wireless enabled, by default from the factory.
• There should be a business card holder or other customizeable identity place. Sharpie in the battery compartment works, though.
• Mentioned briefly above re: lights; the machine should have provisions for being used as a CPU rather than as an all-in-one machine. That means it should operate fine while closed, with the screen shut off, when connected to a monitor and keyboard, or just as a headless server on a network.