Anyone have any advice on buying one of these? I am looking for one that has a solid state drive, backlist keyboard, and preferably over 5 hours batter life, and no bigger than 13 inches. The "instant on" feature is one I am not sure if I am over-valuing so much. I am also wondering if I need to be going the ultrabook route and there may be a laptop with the features I need. I thought this would be a lot easier. I like a lot of asus's stuff, but they seem to be missing some features here.
Look at Toshiba's ultrabook. Toshiba and Asus are highly rated among consumers. I'm using Toshiba's light Portege line (13.3" screen, 3.2 lb weight) and I love it. It's slightly thicker than their new ultrabook and not as shiny, but it's a great notebook that I was more than impressed with when I got it.
Anyone know when they'll start shipping models that supports more than 4GB ram? That stopped me from spending ~1 grand on one.
Totally agree on the Portege; it's an amazing machine that's half the price of a Macbook Air at virtually the same weight, and 7 hours of battery life. It's not going to win any beauty contests, but heck, buy one and buy an iPad on top of it if necessary; or add a high quality SSD and still come out under a grand. If you really want an ultrabook though, I really recommend you wait. Seems like CES has been absolutely flooded with some gorgeous designs at both 13" and 14", and the IvyBridge processor should really amp up the graphics capabilities; if 2011 was a tablet year, 2012 will def be an ultrabook year.
Wait until Windows 8 dude. Night and day difference in the UI - it uses tiles and it's optimized for touch.
I got my fiancee an ASUS Zenbook U31X. It's quite nice. Same specs (13.3", i5 1.7 GHz, 256GB SSD, 4GB RAM) and profile as a MacBook Air, but $250 cheaper. The U21X is 11.1" if you want to go even smaller, but the clock speed is slightly lower and the SSD is half the size. Only thing is: keyboard isn't backlit.
right, makes sense. Thanks everyone for the replies. Now that I think about it, not being able to upgrade the ram over 4gb on the current line of ultrabooks is a pretty valid concern. Lets see what they announce.
I wish Lenovo would release a new X301 with a Ivy Bridge cpu. I have an X301 from 2009 and it is awesome but could be thinner, faster and have longer battery life. Such a nice product but it is starting to show its age even with an SSD.
I might take a look at the Vizio machines when they come out: http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/09/vizio-officially-introduces-pc-line/ Sounds like they're going to be great -- no bloatware, and a nice-looking design. Hopefully they can deliver with great keyboards, trackpads, etc. FWIW I bought a Macbook Air when they refreshed it this past summer and I like it pretty well. I've always been a Thinkpad guy, and if there had been a comparable Thinkpad (the X1 didn't set my world on fire), I might have gotten that instead. The "instant on" thing is a bit oversold in my opinion -- it comes out of sleep faster than many other laptops I've used, but it's not a night and day kind of thing. Booting is a lot faster, but it's rare that I power-off the computer (instead of just putting it to sleep), so I don't think it's quite all that significant. Other file i/o operations are faster though, so you'll definitely notice a difference in use, I just don't think sleep/wake is substantially faster than other laptops.
