For the past few months I’ve been keeping my eye for a good UltraBook to allow to carry less weight while traveling. In the past few hours this has gone from an idea to a necessity as my wife’s laptop video card died.
My current laptop a 15inch Dell XPS L501X feels like the anti-thesis of what I need this days. Big, heavy and barely adequate battery life ~2hrs. Luckily in the past few years a new category has been born the Ultrabook.
My needs – a laptop to do a lot of writing on:
- Lightweight – I want to be happy carrying this thing when I got out for coffee.
- Thin – less space in my backpack would be good
- Kick butt battery life – at least 5hrs. I’m often flying from Ottawa –> San Francisco and unlike Air Canada, United doesn’t have power outlets. I need to get much of a days work done on a plane.
- Great keyboard and trackpad – did I mention that I will be writing a book or two on this thing?
- Good Screen – I need to be able to display two windows with only a little overlap – for note taking when I’m reading or summarizing sources.
- Decent RAM – I’ve been using 8 GB for the past two years dropping back to 4 seems painful
- Must be able to hookup to an external display – my projector, external screen etc.
- Performance: Has to be at least as fast as this XPS L501X. I do sometimes edit photos (Lightroom) on this beast. Its successor has to be able to do that too.
Here’s what I’ve found so far:
As you can see the meagre options seem to point in the direction of either Carbon X1 or the MacBook Air. Anyone got a good option that I missed? Or am I headed down the path of becoming a Mac user – with semi-annual OS upgrades?
