I still haven't found a good laptop that I can take to class. My current laptop is way to heavy to lug around everywhere, and mini PCs are way too small to do anything practical on. I was wondering if there was something similar to the MacBook Air, but without the bank breaking price.

Is there a nice lightweight laptop out there that still has a decent sized screen, but cheaper than the MacBook Air?

Thank,
A_of-s_t (Ivan)

Wait for ultrabooks. Before then, you'd be hard pressed to find 13" or 14" laptops with decent performance and battery life lasting more than one hour.

Aren't they reported to be about the same price as the MacBook Air?

With the Macbook Air, you're paying $300 for the hardware and $1000 for the Apple logo. Ultrabooks by Intel's definition have to be sub-$1000, and tend to have significantly better specs than the Macbook air (from what is said on Apple's website, anyway).

Look into the Sony Vaio S. Starts at $800, comes with a discrete GPU, SD processor, backlit keyboard, 13" screen, ~3.6 pounds. For $75 (for now, discount), you can buy a 1.2 pound sheet battery to attach to the bottom and double battery life to ~15 hrs (or, realistically, 7).

http://www.toshibadirect.com/td/b2c/pdet.to?poid=501921 <--- This Toshiba looks good too. Starts, again, at $800, but comes with an i5 instead of an i3 and a 640GB vs the Sony's starting 320GB drive. Minimum weight of 3.2 pounds; probably lighter than the Vaio S. However, no discrete GPU. And I don't think it has a backlit keyboard. And I don't have any experience with Toshibas.

Aristocrat's just an Apple hater; their laptops are pretty awesome. However, they are, indeed, more expensive, and their sheer specs are inferior; however, they also come with SSD hard drives, making them more durable and significantly faster in many ways than any of the competition at their price point.

Ultrabooks will be nice, but they'll basically be thinner laptops with the next generation of Intel chips, SSD or hybrid drives (primarily SSD, never heard of a hybrid drive on a laptop), and a supposed emphasis on OS speed and battery life. I'd expect Ultrabooks to really start chugging when W8 comes out, because W8 is... well, awesome, fast, and lightweight compared to W7. Still, some others might arrive earlier, but don't expect them to go as low as $800; the SSDs are expensive.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Sep 30 2011, 2:11 am by Centreri.

I used to be really against Apple as well, but the SSD hard drive made me think about buying the MacBook Air. I also figure that the design is really nice and lightweight. That and I can always install Ubuntu on it as well.

The Sony Viao S doesn't appear to have very good battery life either from what I've read, but then again, nothing really has decent battery life any more.

The Macbook Air is a very specialized laptop, built to conserve space and maximize performance. Most manufacturers need much more variety, and individual designs sell much less, so they manufacture their laptops in a less efficient but more flexible way. Maybe if Microsoft made their own laptops, but they don't. You're not finding something with the Air's battery life and decent performance at that price point. The premium Windows laptops are like Apple's computers; more expensive than what you want. These would be the Vaio Z, and to a lesser extent HP Envy and Dell XPS series.

Even so, from what I've read, the Macbook Air's battery life, while nice, isn't that fantastic, either. A promised 7 hours, so a realistic 3-4 hours? Sounds like the Vaio to me. And if you shell out for that battery, you can always double the battery life to beyond the Air's when you feel you'll need to. If I were in your position, that's what I'd pick.

I had high hopes for Win8, until I actually installed it on a VM and tested it out. It is absolutely horrible to use with a keyboard/mouse. Definitely meant to be a tablet and not a desktop OS.



Their laptops would be awesome if the prices dropped at least 70%. I'm not someone who would pay a gigantic premium for the portability factor. Apple, like Intel, has the habit of nearly never dropping prices. What might have been a good deal at the debut of the Macbook Air is now a horrible one.

Most Ultrabooks come with SSDs. If you are buying an Ultrabook, please do not get one with a discrete GPU. Ultrabooks are not made for gaming, but rather portable, lasting computing power. Intel HD graphics is more than sufficient for the tasks that A_of_s_t has in mind while draining a lot less power than a discrete card.

EDIT> Hybrid drives are options on laptops, but only from places like Maingear. Not something you'd see on mainstream laptops.

Find me a laptop, at the price of the Macbook Air or below, with its features, including SSDs, fairly long battery life, resolution, and thinness/weight.

When you don't find it, explain why.

And when you can't, you'll understand why I don't give a fuck what you think about technology. Someone who lacks the ability to set aside prejudices and analyze objectively shouldn't venture into any conversations where money is involved.

If I weren't so interested in Microsoft's ecosystem/hipsterlike, I'd likely have a Mac myself. They have much nicer trackpads, the OS is much smoother/consistent, and the hardware quality is higher than most of the competition.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Sep 30 2011, 4:51 am by Centreri.

If he is going to be lugging it around from class to class you're going to want it to be durable. As soon as I saw this thread I was thinking Macbook Air. Despite Apple hate, they do make good quality products, and the Macbook Air is no exception... It's also the lightest, most durable thing you'll find on the market today.

When ultrabooks come out you will be give much more of a leniency, but I honestly am more skeptical about veering away from Apple when it comes to laptops, whose parts are very specific and detail is key. Especially in ultra-slim models.

My suggestions is to go with an Apple iPad and grab yourself a keyboard to go with it. It's slimmer, far more portable, and cheaper. Chances are you don't need the power of a laptop taking notes or using mathematica.

The currently available Lenovo X220 and T400 models would qualify. Significantly better processor, up to 30 hours advertised battery life, which means around 10 hours battery life under moderate usage conditions. 12.5" for the X220 and 14" for the T400, and they are a lot more sturdy than a Macbook Air which likely damages very easily when dropped due to its thickness tapering to 3mm. Prices are lower than the 13" Macbook Airs when the 128GB SSDs are added.

The only thing that these laptops do not have is the thin wedge factor. If you want portability, you'd better be pretty damn sure the laptop won't break when you drop it. Something with a thickness of 3mm is going to have a hard time holding up against any significant shock.

As for Sacrieur's claim about Apple durability: I've seen ideapads roll down flights of stairs with no visible damage or impairment of function; my iPod touch bricked when I left it near my laptop's exhaust vent too long at the mere temperature of 70 degrees Celsius, while its predecessors using HDDs could not survive five feet drops onto the sidewalk. I doubt the laptops would hold up much better.


...What.

Leaving alone the fact that upgrading a Mac Pro from 6GB to 16GB RAM costs you $750 when when a single stick of 4GB RAM goes for $25 nowadays, that they call the Radeon 5770 to be the cutting edge and "up to 5x faster", and that Apple considers generic no-brand 1TB hard drives to be apparently worth $150 a pop, I'd like to see something actually backing up this statement.

Not be that guy, but why the hell do all thinkpads look like bricks? Haven't they ever heard of aesthetics? Or do they market to people who think bad looking laptop design means hardcore computer nerd?

I'm not paying extra or sacrificing a huge amount of performance for the "ooh-shiny" factor. If you are willing to take a loss in other departments for the "ooh-shiny" factor, please go ahead. I find the marginal utility of "ooh-shiny" to be frankly less than its marginal cost, although this varies from person to person.

Yeah, but why should I have to settle for the ugliest computer ever when I'm still browsing around? It may be durable, but it looks and feels cheap.

You wanted long battery life and portability. Those things generally come at a cost . If it's not an emergency, you have the option to wait until Q4 this year or even Q1 2012 for some decent ultrabooks to get released.

Since I didn't particularly demand small form factor, I just learned to lug around my 15 inch laptop with me. Felt a bit heavy at the start but now I don't mind it at all, especially since the performance I get out of the laptop is stellar.

Lenovo is no longer selling T400's on their website.

The 13" Macbook air now has a SB i5 processor, better than your X220 i3. The Macbook Air also has better resolution, and I couldn't find the weight online, so I assume it to be considerably (at least .5 pounds) heavier as well.

Equipping the X220 with a 160GB SSD, keeping everything else the same, brings the price to $1130. Or, $150 away from the equivalent Macbook Air. For a laptop running Windows, instead of a Mac; with a lower resolution, that looks like it was made ten years ago, with weaker internals, and less portability, no instant-on. I couldn't even find the battery life bit. I assume you're talking about the sheet battery you can attach to the bottom to increase battery life; that costs another $100 (at least), and when used, would add about a pound to the weight.

A far cry from the 70% markup you claimed. In fact, based on this, I'd pick the MBA over the X220 on the hardware alone...

Apple does, indeed, make relatively huge profit margins, but this is largely because they produce what they do for less because they need so damn much of everything with so little customization. Their hardware is fairly competitive, price-wise. They have economy of scale on their side. They make only four variations of the MBA. They sell millions of each, where competitors make 20 models with twenty customizations each. Apple can also buy components for less, because they buy more of them.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Sep 30 2011, 6:18 am by Centreri.

Windows 8 has got two modes. You were using it in tablet mode, where the only applications you can run must be purchased from microsoft's app store, a la Apple and iPad.

They also have a standard desktop mode as per all previous versions of the operating system.

Lenovo ThinkPads are very well built. Despite looking like bricks they are the number one choice among engineers, mostly because they're extremely reliable and durable. But if you're so concerned with your aesthetics, K1s may interest you. Or take your Apple product.

Honestly, I think that if someone worked through everything to set up a VM but didn't realize that what they were using was released exclusively to get developers a preview of the environment they'll be working for, they're not worth talking to about it.

In Centreri land, he can bullshit things and get away with them. However, this is the real world, and that doesn't work anymore.



The desktop mode looks just like Windows 7 except with square corners instead of round corners (I had to delete a .dll from system32 to disable Metro UI, since that was before the registry change was known). Tons of stuff have been changed for the worse: search has been replaced with Bing, Task Manager has been replaced with a dumb blonde version that doesn't have any tabs or advanced settings, most advanced settings are now unavailable to users, shut down is now under settings > power > shut down, reboot restarts the OS instead of the computer, and of course we have these things:

"Turn on requirement for an internet approval from administrator before running unknown programs"
"App history"
"Pick the apps you use to send stuff to devices"

Windows 8 is basically windows 7 dumbed down to make the internet available to stupid people. What is this "App Store" bullshit? It's a computer, not a mobile phone.
There's a freaking "Airplane mode" option in the settings. Do not want.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Sep 30 2011, 6:55 am by Aristocrat.