These days it seems like there's an infinite number of laptop brands to choose from - perhaps staffed by an infinitude of monkeys. Actually, based on my experiences with laptops and the lack of quality of their hardware, this seems like a fairly generous estimate - I would actually place the average engineer somewhere down around slime molds. Having now owned and worked on laptops from most major vendors (and a number of minor ones) I have a few observations to offer - especially in light of today's labor.
I'm writing this message on a HP Pavilion ze5270. Without going into details, this system has a socketed mobile P4, one PS/2 (probably dual/split), a LPT, IEEE1394, one PC Card slot, a Conexant modem (yuck - what is it with HP and Conexant?) and a Radeon IGP 345M. The display looks like about a 14 incher, at XGA resolution. Some months ago, this machine began to have problems charging. They eventually turned out to be a problem with the power connector. This machine has more screws than my video collection, so I avoided digging into it for a very long time, but I finally went in and discovered that the machine came from the factory with a bad solder joint - the hole was not completely filled. In this case there is no strain relief but the solder attached to the terminals on the jack, so it will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with such things that there was a problem.
My usual machine, of course, is a Compaq nw9440, a model number somewhat ubiquitous inside HP/Compaq ("HPQ"). This machine has many (slightly) different internals as it has been continually updated as time has gone by. Without going into excessive detail here (as I have elsewhere) the latest version of my system has a Core 2 rather than Core Duo, 512MB of (discrete) graphics memory rather than 256MB, and a larger hard drive standard as well as a twice-as-fast 16x dual-format, dual-layer DVD recorder. My system was literally ordered in the first week of the nw9440's availability and I had to wait a week for CDW, one of the largest and best-supplied "etailers" of computer equipment on the planet, to get in sufficient stock to fill their initial demand.
While in general I am a huge fan of my system (it's basically a big, ugly, heavy, hot version of a macbook pro, but with some of the fastest laptop graphics around short of having SLI
The replacement drive stopped reading CDs (but would still burn DVDs, let alone read them) within the year. The replacement for that drive was the wrong product - it was an 8X DL +/- drive, but no lightscribe. It was also from Pioneer and it was a horrible piece of shit, regularly failing to burn on one try and then working properly on the second, and with very poor read speeds for both audio and video, and not too sharp about generic data either. That has been replaced with a TSST (Toshiba-Samsung Storage Tech.) drive which has the proper attributes, but it's not even labeled as an HP drive. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not, but I hope it works as well with my crapload of HP media as my HP drives did before they died the death of a thousand dogs, amen.
Now, to circle around to the allusions of my opening paragraph at last. To the best of my knowledge, the last decent laptop is the Lenovo Thinkpad. I used the full name here to underscore the fact that not only is it made in China, but the profit is pretty much stopping there, too. One of my goals these days is to put as little energy into the Chinese economy as I possibly can, especially while living in the US. I think that their runaway development is counterproductive to just about everything I hold dear, although that may just be paranoia. Still, ask the people in Los Angeles how they feel about Chinese industrialism these days - they're breathing more pollution from China than they are from local sources, no joke.
My backup system is an IBM Thinkpad A21p with a 1600x1200 15" display. This system has ATI Rage Pro Mobility M3 graphics with 16MB discrete on AGP2x and a Mobile P3 850 and is actually quite sweet with Ubuntu Linux on it once you manage to get everything working properly. The graphics driver doesn't get the panel's settings right and you have to work up your own xorg.conf, which I have of course done. In fact, you need to use the conf just to use a graphical installer! Luckily, this is easily possible with Ubuntu's LiveCD, if you know what you are doing. Unfortunately, IBM's offered (and purchased, at least by me) MiniPCI combo card features supported ethernet and an unsupported winmodem from 3Com. My nw9440 has a Conexant winmodem with a pay-to-use driver, but at least I can use it.
To be fair, I've actually had some of the best luck with Compaq over the years. One of my best laptops (for its age, naturally) was a Compaq with a K6/2 at 433MHz and ATI Rage Pro (Mobility M1) 16MB graphics. This was just barely enough machine to play a DVD at fullscreen (800x600) resolution if you used the bundled Compaq-branded version of whatever DVD player software they used, which was optimized for both ATI's motion compensation hardware of the day, and the K6/2 specifically. I actually repaired the system's keyboard, which was damaged by what looked like a minute quantity of cola or coffee before I bought it, by cleaning away the remnants of the destroyed traces and drawing them back in with a conductive pen. Then I sold the machine, and as far as I know the purchasers were happy with what they got and what they paid (they knew how to get ahold of me, and never complained...)
My worst laptop was a pentium-era Sony Vaio. It had neomagic graphics and, I think, a mobile pentium chip. It was moderately good on battery life and very slim, but running anything but Windows 98 on it was an exercise in frustration - the only other OS you could get drivers for was Windows ME, and I don't really need to say much about that. These days you can probably get OSS drivers for everything, but what would you use it for? An X terminal? A mp3 player? The sad thing is that drivers existed, but they would refuse to run on the system and Sony never repackaged them. I'm sure they've been hacked by now; I got rid of them back then.
And just to walk down memory lane for a moment, long ago in the heart of Texas (Austin is more like the fun parts than any completely internal organ, but anyway) where IBM is deeply entrenched, I ended up temporarily owning an IBM Thinkpad Power Series 850. This was a PowerPC 603e-based RS/6000 workstation laptop with an Ultra-Narrow SCSI bus and SCSI storage devices, which ran AIX. It was fairly useless to me (I surfed on it a bit) but quite solid and amazing. IBM has been knocking out the goodies for quite a few years, it seems.
I'm not going to go into an exhaustive rant about how practically everything sucks these days, I don't even have a lawn to order you off of. But here's a real, solid question for you: can you even find a ~15" non-widescreen laptop with a core duo? If you can, can you find one under a grand and/or that is not a tablet PC? The only one I've heard of so far has been a barebones ASUS system and frankly, if I wanted to build laptops, I'd be an electronics engineer.