Just chiming in to suggest the Asus UX305F laptop or similar. Mine is very portable (important to me in a laptop), works great with my linux install (everything

Just chiming in to suggest the Asus UX305F laptop or similar. Mine is very portable (important to me in a laptop), works great with my linux install (everything out of the box goes great except brightness keys which require re-assigning to work), is passively cooled and has a nice SSD. Perhaps it has been replaced by a newer model with more RAM (mine only has 8GB) which would be good for VMs, but I don't keep up with the Jones' so I'm not sure. The thing works great for me at a fraction of the cost - it was $499 on one of the bit online shops when I got it. I think laptops are quite a personal choice, and finding the 'perfect' one is very difficult. I couldn't quite justify spending as much as a Carbon X1/X3, or the top MBP, and a year down the track I'm very glad I didn't. YMMV etc : )