My Long-Running, Not-Yet-Complete, Investigation into a New Haswell Ultrabook

Anyone who follows me on twitter may be familiar with my ridiculous, drawn out, indecisive process when i have to buy new gear. It’s time for a new laptop. I’ve been thinking about it for months. Because of this I have the added problem of forgetting what I liked or didn’t like about certain machines.

Here’s what I know I want:

Intel Haswell chip for long battery..most likely i7, but i5 could suffice Light! I am hoping for under 3 pounds. Min 8GB RAM Min 256 GB Drive Quiet because even though I record my Pluralsight & other videos on my desktop, I need to have my laptop running at the same time. In my hands and ready to head off to conferences with me at the end of this month!

I do production code and video recording and run VMs on my desktop. Everything else on my laptop including pick it up and go when I travel. So I don’t need quad core heavy duty on the laptop.

What I’ve looked at seriously:

 

Acer Aspire S7-392-9890 13.3-Inch Touchscreen Ultrabook

This is under 3 pounds. It claims a 7 hr battery life. According to a number of friends, the previous version (Ivy Bridge) has a lot of fan noise. Perhaps the Haswell version is quieter, but there is a possible showstopper for me: no F keys. The number keys serve as number and FKeys meaning that you have to do learn new key combos to Run or Debug an app in Visual Studio etc etc. Or to use Zoomit. I just don’t know if I want to make that commitment.

Showstopper: No F Keys

 

Toshiba KIRAbook 13 i7 Touchscreen Laptop

Cori Drew loves hers even though she threw it across the room (accidentally as she was wandering around looking for wifi because hers has a faulty wifi card or something like that). But, it’s got amazing resolution – to compete with Mac’s Retina display, is very light, very high end and very well built. Plus she says the customer service is fantastic. But….here we go again….the fan is crazy noisy. Crazy noisy like in a room full of developers, all eyes will suddently be on her becaus eof the fan. Many reviews complain about this as well. This just won’t work for recording.

Showstopper: Head turning fan noise

Samsung ATIV Book 9 NP900X3E-K01US 13.3-Inch Full HD Premium Ultrabook

Everything I’m looking for and 2.6 pounds, but this Engadget review mentions the fan noise:

The ATIV Book 9 Plus pipes up quickly -- heck, it sometimes makes noise when it's sitting idle. But that noise never rises above a quiet sigh. In fact, we didn't even notice it until we paused Pandora and started to work without any background noise. 

“Quiet sigh”….I have worked hard to reduce the noise in my office for recording. I don’t know how loud a quiet sigh is but since it’s loud enough to write a whole paragraph about, I’m guessing louder than I want.

Showstopper: Fan noise?

Apple MacBook Air MD760LL/A 13.3-Inch Laptop (NEWEST VERSION)

Yes, a macbook! Many friends use MacBook Pro with Windows & Visual Studio development. But the 2013 MbA has a haswell chip and can come configured with 8GB RAM and up to a 512GB drive. It doesn’t have the Retina display but that was one of those features I didn’t know I needed. It’s under 3 pounds. I could get a Pro with Retina display for another 1/2 lb but a quad core mac book pro is a 4.5 lb 15” computer. That’s about what I have now (though obviously much nicer, longer battery life and more powerful). But size matters, too! :)

Cons are no touch screen. I use my touch screen a lot on my laptop. I would miss it madly.

I’m going to be near the local Apple reseller today and will try them out. I’m hoping they’ll have Airs and Pros with Win8 installed on them.

Dell XPS 12 Convertible Ultrabook

I’d ignored this because it’s weird looking but that’s silly.Very high end, great graphics, 8+ hrs of battery.

It’s also 3.35 pounds, which I know is negligible and still a lot less than the 4.75 lbs of my thinkpad when I have the extra battery in it (which is always when I’m travelling)

Sony VAIO Pro SVP13215PXB 13.3-Inch Core i7 Touchscreen Ultrabook

Forgot that I had looked into this , perfect in every way but:

showstopper: fan noise (http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony-owners-lounge-forum/720737-official-vaio-pro-13-owners-lounge-svp13-2013-a-88.html) & http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/726097-sony-vaio-pro-13-fan-noise-return.html

:(

ThinkPad X1 Carbon Touch

(I can hear Scott Hanselman now, “'all that research and you missed my blog post review?”.

“starting at 3.4 lbs” so I wasn’t really looking at it. Plus in the comments of Scott’s post, another owner says “One other thing that really bothers me is that the fan is running at a quite noisy level – constantly”. :(

Am I asking too much?

Am I being too much of a stickler about the noise? Head-turning loud (Kirabook) is really impossible for me for recording. Maybe the Samsung Kiva’s “quite sigh” is not going to be a bad thing after all. I just need some more feedback on that. I just don’t want to buy something, make the effort of setting it up and then decided I don’t like it.

Coming soon but not soon enough for my pre-conference hopeful deadline:

Not to be overlooked is the new Surface 2 Pro. It will also be light, fast, long battery life, touch screen etc. But I really wanted to have something before I head off to conferences at the end of this month so that’s not doable unless I keep waiting and lug my thinkpad around for more trips. And I want to hear what my friends say about it before I buy one.

Dell: Precision M3800 workstation: 4.5 lbs …NOPE

Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook  about 3 lbs, but still “coming soon…”