I recently bought an older model Asus Eee PC at a fairly low price. Couple hundred bucks for something that lasts about four or five hours on battery power, has a couple hundred gigs of storage, and allows me to write on the go without hauling around a giant metal briefcase? Seemed sensible enough to me. I guess it depends on what you want to do with it. Definitely spring for dual core models with dedicated graphics if 1) you want to watch videos on it (on trains, etc. -- I know 10" monitors are less than ideal) and 2) can reasonably rely on the presence of a power source. You can get by with a single-core clunker like I'm doing if you want to spend less cash and aren't endlessly frustrated by the mediocre performance. I try not to think of it as a laptop, but instead as a slightly more elaborate sheaf of papers.

EEEpc is pretty much the standard, nothing special pretty cheap. But all the big names have some version of a netbook.

I've got an EEEpc myself, and it does the job perfectly well. I saw no convincing reasons to get a Macbook when I was looking at netbooks, and if there were strong arguments in favor of it, the absurd price canceled them out.

Another vote for Acer. Have deployed 50+ of their netbooks in the field .

Very few returns on the units we've shipped out.

*Also as a side request , please people don't let your netbook/notebook sit on the AC for 24 hours straight every day. You basically kill one of the biggest draws of your mobile computer(the battery) by letting the batteries die prematurely.

Current, tentative money saving plan is to put boot camp on my macbook, since they won't put monitoring software on that. Still, I wouldn't -mind- getting a netbook, since even the macbook can be a little heavy to lug around and it's not like I need something awesome to read the innanet.