I am considering buying a new laptop for Java/J2EE development. I would like to stay away from Dell or Acer. I am roughly thinking of MackBook Pro or IBM Thinkpad.
I would appreciate any suggestions. What do you guys use as development box? What do you recommend?

The best is Dell as it has a very high performance as well as its customer support is excellent.

So, go for as DELL as you also need customer support if your system fails. I have a Dell XPS M1730 and its awesome and works very fast and good without a glitch.

It doesn't really matter,

Thinkpad  is the best, go for it.

Thank you all.
devilwithin999, Dell has a pathetic customer service. And the quality of dell notebooks have gone down the hill, esp with their Inspiron series.
Anyone using Mackbook Pro?

It depends on what IDE you want to use for your dev work. My first J2EE project (several years ago) was entirely based on command-line tools that came with the JDK. That took very little system resources (300MHz processor and 128MB RAM were plenty). If you're comfortable with the command-line, you won't need a fancy machine at all.

But there are several IDEs that make the Java/J2EE dev work easier. Some of them (such as Eclipse) are very versatile, but demand a lot of your system resources. (Eclipse will probably need a 2GHz processor, 2GB RAM to function optimally). Others such as Borland JBuilder are less hogging... I don't do full time Java anymore, but whenever I have to, I now use Sun's NetBeans IDE on a box with 2GHz process and 1GB of RAM... Works great.