5 ms·

I thought the situation improved a bit with the appearance of ultrabooks; however I haven't had a chance to test one of them thoroughly. Did they bring higher

• dangrossman 13y ago
  If you're willing to spend at least $1500, you can find some ultrabooks with decent build quality from Lenovo/Asus/Samsung/Sony. None of them get every detail right; keyboard layout is always a challenge, and I had to remap home/end/pageup/pagedown to make this one usable for programming. Vendor-specific apps for the trackpad and power management suck and they'll be installed on even the most expensive systems. One problem seems to be that we're such a tiny addressable market at this point that the best PCs never make it into stores. You won't find any Haswell i7's in ultrabooks at Best Buy / Staples / etc; just the lower-end i5 and HD5000 graphics clones each brand made. This one was only available from Amazon, which seems to pick up something like 30 units a month from ASUS. Samsung makes a very nice configuration of their Ativ Book 9 Plus that's both beautiful and powerful, but when I checked my local stores they only stocked cheaper models.
• cabbeer 13y ago
  Apple has economies of scale to their advantage, the macbook air is really competitively priced compared to their windows alternative.