I think the laptop buying question is settled for the moment

I've got to hand back my Macbook Pro in a while as I don't actually own the thing and so I've been investigating whether to buy a laptop and, if so, what to buy. The release of Windows 8 seems like a good reason not to buy a Windows-based machine (even if it'd probably be running Linux most of the time in any case). Looking for ideas as to when the next round of Macbooks is out I came across the following description of some new Intel chips being released to the world in June from when they were originally announced back in :

It will be the successor to the Ivy Bridge architecture, which has yet to ship for 2012, and is built on the same 22nm process but promises up to a 20-fold reduction of overall power consumption.

Not a whole bunch of technical details were revealed on the Intel Haswell, but the promised performance of the new chip architecture was jaw-dropping. A laptop running on the Intel Haswell chip can reportedly run for 24 hours on one charge and remain for 10 days on connected standby. And because the 22nm 3D transistor architecture uses so little power, it can run on a solar cell.

Battery life has in the past been one of my main deciding factors in determining laptops to buy. Now, hearing of the chips being released in June, the answer seems to be to wait

(Now if only I didn't discover today digging my Intel i3 / 4 gig RAM laptop out of hiding that the Windows registry on the machine is unrecoverably corrupt and there appear to be no system restore points to restore the machine's state to).