What brands can be trusted? Also, recommendations for ultralight?

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NleahciM

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Hi - I am in the market for a new laptop. I need to have it in my hands before the end of the week. So I'm hoping to get it chosen and ordered todayish.

What brands can be trusted these days? It used to be IBM, but is Lenovo still OK? What about Samsung? Acer? Dell? etc.

As for what I want - I have been using an 13" Apple Air (company issued) and I really like the form factor. I do not want another Apple laptop, but that size seems to work nicely for me. I do not need an optical drive. I think an SSD makes a lot of sense for me as I travel a ton (and thus I think I'm hard on hard drives with lots of shaking). I will want to run Windows 7 (or maybe 8) on the device.

I don't have high end computing needs - I don't play video games. I occasionally do some very CPU heavy electronic circuit simulation so for that it'd be nice to have lots of RAM and a fast CPU, but that is not super important. Battery life is important though - 5 hours would be nice.

Budget is $1K, but I'd be happy if I could spend less.

Any suggestions for makes and/or models of laptops to be looking at?
 
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Samsung makes some decent ultrabooks, check out their series 9 models. Lenovo still makes solid machines as well, but their only true ultrabook imho is the Carbon X1.
 
Acer s7, Sony vaio pro 11 (might still have some wifi issues), samsung ... 9 i think should fit the bill off the top of my head. The acer I think is the least expensive
 
Kueller said:
Samsung makes some decent ultrabooks, check out their series 9 models. Lenovo still makes solid machines as well, but their only true ultrabook imho is the Carbon X1.
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Thanks - my girlfriend has a Samsung ultrabook (not sure of the model) and it seems like a super nice device. I think it was $500ish at "Best" Buy.

What do you mean by "true ultrabook"?
 
Acer is pretty underrated - albeit, not that durable. I'm using a 17" Aspire refurb with a 128gb SSD + 500GB. No complaints
 
The Dell Latitude and Precision lines are good.

I don't have any current experience with their Inspiron line.
 
NleahciM said:
Thanks - my girlfriend has a Samsung ultrabook (not sure of the model) and it seems like a super nice device. I think it was $500ish at "Best" Buy.

What do you mean by "true ultrabook"?
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Lenovo markets some laptops as ultrabooks (T440 4lbs, 0.8", U530 5lbs, 0.86"), that I feel are a bit on the fat and heavy side compared to the current Samsung 9's, McBook Airs, Acer S7's, ect. Most of Lenovo's thin and light offerings are now some sort of hybrid, the Yoga/Thinkpad Yoga/Thinkpad Helix/Miix2 10 and 11.

The only lenovo model I would call an ultrabook if you set out the entire product line in front of me and asked me to classify them would be the X1, and maybe the T440s.
 
0.8" doesn't sound bad, that's as thick as the Dell XPS 12 flip screen...But compared to this 0.5" thick Samsung 9, it's 60% thicker.

None of this in any way means Thinkpads can't be trusted, they absolutely can be...they're just a little bit heftier than some of the competition.
 
NleahciM said:
Thanks - my girlfriend has a Samsung ultrabook (not sure of the model) and it seems like a super nice device. I think it was $500ish at "Best" Buy.

What do you mean by "true ultrabook"?
Click to expand...

I wouldn't get caught on the term Ultrabook. Ultrabook is a form of branding by Intel with some specific requirements.

You're better off focusing more on specifics you need (such as size/weight/functionality) if you're willing to put in the research.

With that are you looking for Macbook Air 11 form factor, screen size, and performance specs but using windows? How flexible and/or important are these requirements/wants? Do you care about the display quality (the Air is a low res TN, by comparison you can get 1080p, or higher, IPS windows devices at that price range). Would you be interested in things like tablet functionality or pen support?

You could run windows on the Mac.
 
limitedaccess said:
I wouldn't get caught on the term Ultrabook. Ultrabook is a form of branding by Intel with some specific requirements.

You're better off focusing more on specifics you need (such as size/weight/functionality) if you're willing to put in the research.

With that are you looking for Macbook Air 11 form factor, screen size, and performance specs but using windows? How flexible and/or important are these requirements/wants? Do you care about the display quality (the Air is a low res TN, by comparison you can get 1080p, or higher, IPS windows devices at that price range). Would you be interested in things like tablet functionality or pen support?

You could run windows on the Mac.
Click to expand...

Don't worry about that - I've been assuming that "ultrabook" is a similar marketing term to "centrino" (I may be aging myself here...) but that term does represent what I'm looking for.

I just realized that my current computer (that I'm losing) is an Apple A1466, which is a 13.3" air, not 11" as I mistakenly stated. I would prefer to move away from Apple - though the hardware is pretty good (besides the razor sharp edges) I have some problems with the way the company does business.

Tablet/pen support are nice to have, but not essential. Frankly, I do not know how I would use them so that's a bit of a confusing thing for me. As for screen resolution - I have very good close up vision so I see high resolution as a pretty big plus. The 3200x1800 screen that the higher end Yoga 2 and Book 9 laptops have is very attractive to me. The carbon X1's 2560x1440 would probably also be just fine. The surface 2 pro has the worst resolution of the bunch (1920x1280) but that is still probably OK. My current computer (the air) has a resolution of 1440x900 and that sometimes causes problems for me, so I'm fairly confident that I want higher than that.
 
OK I did some serious comparisons of the competition...

Right now - it seems like I get the best bang for the buck with this guy: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/lenovo-...lver/1817254.p?id=1219065404810&skuId=1817254

$1200 gets me a yoga 2 pro with a core i7 1.8GHz CPU, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, and the ridiculous 3200x1800 display. Reviews show the yoga 2 pro to have worse battery life than most of the competition (the Apple air has about double, the book 9 has about 50% more, and the surface is about the same). But otherwise it seems to be the winner at that price point. Plus it's available immediately (though from Best Buy... Ugh...)

Anybody have any concerns with this choice? Any value in getting an extra warranty?
 
Check the MS Store out. They have some deals at the moment including the Samsung Ativ Book 9 Plus $1100 and Dell XPS 12 (i7-4500u version) for $1300.

If you want to go above $1000 that opens up a lot of choices. Some choices not mentioned yet are the Sony Vaio Pro 13 (it's regularly on sale here for $1000 Canadian now, not sure about the US) and the Duo 13 (if you want the pen support). There is also the Dell XPS 13.

Regarding high PPI resolutions on a small screen, my recommendation is to get some first hand experience first. The scaling situation with Windows is not the same as mobile phones or even OSX. Personally at a 14 inch 1080p laptop is about the threshold I'd work with without any DPI scaling (at the same time I could tell a clear advantage over a 1600x900 14 inch screen), this of course would vary person to person. Having to run higher DPI scaling in Windows isn't necessarily an issue but you should be aware of what you getting in that case.

If you do want above 1080p though the ones that are on the market at the moment I believe are the -
Toshiba Kirabook
Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro
Samsung Ativ Book 9 Plus
Asus Zenbook UX301

The biggest improvements from the more expensive device is screen quality and material quality.
 
OK - one more thing - I just realized I was confused here. I was getting the Yoga and Yoga 2 pro mixed up. The former is a thinkpad, the latter is a consumer oriented laptop.

Anybody see any reasons to be concerned that the yoga 2 pro is consumer oriented? The $1200 model at Best Buy seems like a good value compared to the competition...

Also note that the Yoga does not have the epic screen resolution that the yoga 2 pro has, but it does support a pen which is cool.
 
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