Cost of Windows UltraBooks

dejongj

dejongj

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So I've been looking around a bit for a Windows laptop, dual purpose and I don't really need two ethernet ports any more as a USB dongle work fine :) I'm just shocked at the prices for a light weight, long battery life, fairly powerful with decent storage laptop.

To put it into context; my Apple MBA is my benchmark. It is a 13" with Intel Core i7, 8GB, 512GB PCI-E SSD, Intel HD5000 graphics and 1440x900 resolution. Battery life is good for around 10-12 hours, at least to such a degree I don't have to take a charger with me. It is fairly light at 1.35Kg and in a compact package such that it fits in my Billingham Hadley Pro bag. I paid £1,485 for that in 2013.

Firstly I find nearly two years on that choice of a similar package is still very much so lacking; only true candidates that I can see are the Dell XPS 13 and Lenovo ThinkPad X1 everything else seems so bulky, and just lacking the basic specifications....

Dell XPS 13 - Same spec but admittedly a much better screen QHD+ and slightly increased graphics for Intel HD5500, yet still limited to a maximum of 8GB and 512GB SSD, is £1,378.80. So only £100 cheaper nearly two years on...

Lenovo X1 - Same spec but again a much better screen QHD and Intel HD5500 graphics, but again still limited to a maximum of 8GB and 512GB SSD is an eye watering £2,001.99. Wow.

So I'm lowering my sights and go for like generic laptop builders like pcspecialist, and whilst something like the 13.3" Lafite is a pretty decent price, the battery life is just a serious compromise. One would have to carry the charger around all the time.

Am I missing something? Are there other decent light weight options? 16GB and more storage would be great....
 
dejongj said:
To put it into context; my Apple MBA is my benchmark.
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Not only yours but every manufacturer out there competing with it. Anything which competes with it is priced similarly...
 
arad85 said:
Not only yours but every manufacturer out there competing with it. Anything which competes with it is priced similarly...
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I guess it is a fair enough comment indeed. I was looking just now on the forums of pcspecialist where there was concerns that it was priced too low to be taken seriously :( I must admit that I might actually try that one and take the hit on battery life to 'only' have 7.5h but perhaps get one of those emergency battery packs to leave in the office...
 
Just realised that the PCSpecialist version only does HDMI out....aaargh unless someone knows a good hdmi -> display port converter that supports 2560x1600 natively it becomes rather useless :(
 
dejongj said:
I guess it is a fair enough comment indeed. I was looking just now on the forums of pcspecialist where there was concerns that it was priced too low to be taken seriously :( I must admit that I might actually try that one and take the hit on battery life to 'only' have 7.5h but perhaps get one of those emergency battery packs to leave in the office...
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Or a second charger to keep at the office? Possibly cheaper than a spare battery.
 
daugirdas said:
you want HDMI 2.0 http://www.hdmi.org/manufacturer/hdmi_2_0/

It may take another few years before PC manufacturers finally decide to upgrade the gold standard VGA ports :)
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My Samsung series 5 is an ultrabook esque laptop, 13" screen, i5 with 12Gb of RAM (6Gb standard) a 750Gb hybrid SSD/HDD drive (I needed the space, but SSD was available). HDMI output, Gigabit LAN, USB3 (no native VGA, had to use a dongle) and was £600 brand new from John Lewis.

Battery is only about 4 hours though. I had a Dell XPS 15z before which was made out of play dough, good battery life though.

We have 4 of these Samsungs, been going strong for 2 years now. Was looking for a replacement and found out from Samsung that they no longer do laptops. Which is really funny as there are lots on their laptop.

It isn't fun finding a laptop, you have 3 choices;

cheap crap at £300
Macbook
Ultrabook - costing more than a Macbook ???
 
You can say that again :(

I'm becoming strangle tempted to spend the money on a Surface Pro 3 or a Yoga Pro 3. Neither of which actually meet my requirements and cost more than a MacBook. What on earth is going on :eek:

If only the Surface Pro 3 was able to have some more memory.
 
I spent ages looking for an ultrabook, ended up with a sony vaio but you can't buy those any more,
http://www.sony.co.uk/support/en/product/SVP1321C5E/updates

Before that I had a Dell XPS13 but I really didn't like it, heavy and poor battery life plus I was never happy with the screen, colours never seemed correct. The sony is vastly superior and I'm still using it to this day but god knows what I will get next as i'm due to replace it. I won't bother with touchscreen, it just makes the screen thicker and any time I do use it I end frowning at the thumb print i've put on the screen.
 
Try asus or acer. They usually do cheap and cheerful ones. One of them is actually good and generally reliable but I can't remember which one it is.
 
Peige said:
I spent ages looking for an ultrabook, ended up with a sony vaio but you can't buy those any more,
http://www.sony.co.uk/support/en/product/SVP1321C5E/updates

Before that I had a Dell XPS13 but I really didn't like it, heavy and poor battery life plus I was never happy with the screen, colours never seemed correct. The sony is vastly superior and I'm still using it to this day but god knows what I will get next as i'm due to replace it. I won't bother with touchscreen, it just makes the screen thicker and any time I do use it I end frowning at the thumb print i've put on the screen.
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My first 'personal' laptop was a Vaio Z600TEK, brilliant little machine. And I must admit, it looks like the Vaio team is returned and continuing the good work outside Sony with this being reported as their first/next release....

http://www.engadget.com/2015/02/16/vaio-z-flagship-laptop-return/

Looks great on paper...
 
srichards said:
Try asus or acer. They usually do cheap and cheerful ones. One of them is actually good and generally reliable but I can't remember which one it is.
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I think it is the S7, for what it is I think it is way overpriced and would rather go for a Lenovo X1 or a Dell XPS13 (2015 model).

It is just painful being on the cutover point of Haswell to Broadwell, I know that there will be lots and lots of great battery life laptops coming out in the next few months....I've just got to sit tight....
 
Saying that, I noticed a refurbished Yoga 3 Pro on eBay with 512GB SSD for a very good value...
 
I hope not too long :)
 
The shocking thing for me is the fact that a Mac Book Pro or a Mac Book Air is now looking cheap compared to the offerings from some of the other companies. I hate OSX, but love iOS. I find it odd that the Mac Book Pro which was overpriced a few years ago is now likely as my next laptop.
 
LOL I quite like OS X, but do fancy something else...But yes, considering everyone is always suggesting they are overpriced etc, well they are most definitely not...Most definitely not at all.....I'm still shocked by how much a decent PC Laptop is......
 
It may depend on the model of Macbook. I ended up buying a Dell XPS15 because it cost me £1000 instead of £1500 for the same spec refurb macbook pro. Ultrabooks have almost completely failed to catch on in the Windows world, which is almost certainly why they don't undercut the Apple equivalent by a fair margin.
 
ancient_mariner said:
It may depend on the model of Macbook. I ended up buying a Dell XPS15 because it cost me £1000 instead of £1500 for the same spec refurb macbook pro. Ultrabooks have almost completely failed to catch on in the Windows world, which is almost certainly why they don't undercut the Apple equivalent by a fair margin.
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It is £1,449 on Dell's website including VAT, how do you get it for £1,000....Great screen though...Although the device is bigger than I would like...

Got a mailer regarding the Asus UX305 which looks nice as well, but aren't convinced I could live with a Core M processor....Oh choices
 
dejongj said:
It is £1,449 on Dell's website including VAT, how do you get it for £1,000....Great screen though...Although the device is bigger than I would like...
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Dell outlet. I quoted the refurb Macbook price because it was the equivalent - I think a 'new' one was >£1800. The screen really is good, with the problem that it makes images look much better than they are on lesser screens. :p

The weaknesses I've found so far are that the trackpad implementation is inferior to Apple's, battery life is shorter and windows sometimes struggles with some types of external screen connection (had problems with connecting to an HDMI TV last week).

Size & weight wise, physically it's close to a 15" macbook and actually weighs less than my first gen Unibody macbook.

See here: http://outlet.euro.dell.com/Online/InventorySearch.aspx?c=uk&cs=ukdfh1&l=en&s=dfh&brandid=7&fid=1547
 
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Hmm price has come down considerably for Surface Pro 3, and topcashback is having a £105 deal as well. I might no longer be able to resist :eek:

I "played" with one today and wow those things are quick and responsive. The screen is stunning as well, absolutely stunning.
 
dejongj said:
Hmm price has come down considerably for Surface Pro 3, and topcashback is having a £105 deal as well. I might no longer be able to resist :eek:

I "played" with one today and wow those things are quick and responsive. The screen is stunning as well, absolutely stunning.
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I was looking at the SP3 this weekend too. Looks like a decent bit of kit and gives me what i've been looking for in terms of performance against portability and connectivity. The ipad is so close to what I need but IOS is just a little too constrictive, with win8.1 I can use all the software I need as well as download and upload files in a way IOS just can't handle.
 
I've got mine now, just struggling with windows. The lack of a unified mailbox and support for carddav and caldav is just shocking. The hardware is great but windows is severely behind for elementary business tasks in my opinion. Such a shame.

Further more it is so disjointed contacts and calendaring are not integrated by the OS and application specific. So touch interface and desktop have different versions and duplication. It is madness in my opinion.
 
dejongj said:
I've got mine now, just struggling with windows. The lack of a unified mailbox and support for carddav and caldav is just shocking. The hardware is great but windows is severely behind for elementary business tasks in my opinion. Such a shame.

Further more it is so disjointed contacts and calendaring are not integrated by the OS and application specific. So touch interface and desktop have different versions and duplication. It is madness in my opinion.
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Some windows users (those who have thought about it) don't want those things integrated by the OS, but would prefer to chose the applications for those tasks. This is a key differentiator between the approaches of Windows and OSX, where Apple want to manage everything for you, while windows offers you a platform on which your selected applications manage themselves. I prefer the windows approach, but I can see why it might be unsettling coming from an apple background.
 
I can see you point, however I wouldn't describe the lack of a unified mailbox as unsettling. Nor would I say a disjointed touch and desktop application interface and contacts/calendaring as unsettling.

OS X does allow the choice of many different clients if anyone so wishes. There is no difference there. But also allows frameworks such that any of such applications can integrate and thus one day I can use app 1 and the second day app 2 and have access to the same data.

Granted it is a different approach, similar to properly enterprise architected applications where there is separation between the UI, business logic and database.

Fair enough to be different, but one task is now taking so much longer. I really don't get why people wouldn't want a unified mailbox?
 
I can think of at least a couple of reasons for not wanting a unified mailbox: wanting to keep work and private emails separate, concerns about security spring immediately to mind.

I use Outlook for mail, contact and calendar functions, which works well for me for business. For private use (elsewhere) I have Thunderbird that does the same things. I just don't see the need for these things to be built in, because many mail applications also have calendar and contact management too.
 
It is just a view, it is not mixing the mailboxes physically on the contrary. It is merely brining it together via a view. Unlike the workarounds in Outlook which suggest to bring it together into a single file which then breaks IMAP and mobile device access.

Anyway surely choice is better than coming up with reasons why you wouldn't want something? If you don't want it you don't have to use it.
 
Interesting you say that OSX brings together for viewing, rather than mashing it all together: guess I never took any notice of how it worked since I'd no intention of using it. And you're suggesting mixing pop3 and imap breaks imap, or is that just Outlook?

As for choices, Microsoft have been in a difficult place. Because of the OS' ubiquity they were being considered to be locking out the competition if they included too much functionality in their OS, so it's likely that if they had used a similar approach to Apple & tied everything together they would have ben accused of creating a monopoly. It's probably not an area they can easily win in.
 
Sorry I must have explained it wrongly. The work around on desktop outlook involved setting up a rule to move mail from on inbox to another folder. You can do this for all accounts and then have this folder, call it unified inbox, in you favourites and voila they are all together. Whilst it does that well, and it will retain which account it was sent to and it will use that automatically to reply. What outlook is actually doing is moving it out of the IMAP inbox and into another folder.

Thus when outlook does its send/receive it will remove it from the server and you no longer have continuity across other devices.

That fudge could be ok for some, but for those who leave their desktop on, move to their mobile or tablet they will find themselves in a situation where no mail is available.

The odd thing is, the Outlook clients for iOS and Android work absolutely fine and how anyone would expect them to work. It is just on windows itself where it has this messy approach.

I disagree on the monopoly status, I think it is he reverse. If they made it open then all could enjoy it with plenty of third party vendors. But hey ho, it is the way it is.

I'm seriously thinking about what to do with this device as for me it can't even do the basics right and thus making it pretty pointless.
 
Anyone who uses Outlook for mail must have a death wish. It really is a pile of poo as it tries to manage things like an overprotective mother. Want your mailbox sorted by conversations AND have two of them expanded at the same time - uhhh... no can do. I use it in work because it integrates well with exchange and all the integrated comms apps I use (Lync mainly). At home I use Thunderbird - which can be setup to do all that you are looking for (as far as I can see from the comments).
 
dejongj said:
I really don't get why people wouldn't want a unified mailbox?
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I don't integrate my mailbox - even for personal mails. I find it more confusing and prefer to see several accounts and the mails I have in them. The accounts I have tend to be used for different things - keeping them separate is kind of like a pre-filing system for me in my brain.
 
arad85 said:
Anyone who uses Outlook for mail must have a death wish. It really is a pile of poo as it tries to manage things like an overprotective mother. Want your mailbox sorted by conversations AND have two of them expanded at the same time - uhhh... no can do. I use it in work because it integrates well with exchange and all the integrated comms apps I use (Lync mainly). At home I use Thunderbird - which can be setup to do all that you are looking for (as far as I can see from the comments).
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Outlook isn't good at threading. I personally can't stand threaded email. I know when I sent someone an email and can go and find it. Remembering it was in a conversation about something else I replied to on Tuesday is a nightmare
 
Dale_tem said:
Outlook isn't good at threading. I personally can't stand threaded email. I know when I sent someone an email and can go and find it. Remembering it was in a conversation about something else I replied to on Tuesday is a nightmare
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Threading mails gets more important when you have multiple conversations on the go at once. I thread my work mail, I have my personal mail flat.
 
I love threaded mails, and unified.

@arad85 you are right firebird does what I want, but unfortunately not for the touch interface part.

One mail system which is very promising is touchmail.co I really like it. But then you get into the trouble about synching people and calendaring across multiple devices and the lack of support for carddav or caldav.

So much tinkering already in the past 48 hours to get it to work. I love the concept but it needs a lot more work to unify a full desktop with a touch interface as well.

It's a shame Ubuntu hasn't got theirs sorted either. I wonder whether that is why Apple has taken so long and no sign of combining both.

I commend Microsoft for pushing the boundaries and the hardware is great. Just need to push the software.

Ps. IntelliJ runs perfectly in it :)
 
arad85 said:
Threading mails gets more important when you have multiple conversations on the go at once. I thread my work mail, I have my personal mail flat.
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Nah

Folders and rules. I have too many emails with too many different people. Also have emails between x number of people, but there are about 10 conversations on the go.
 
The best rule I ever created in outlook was the one that moved any email with "unsubscribe" into a separate folder, bloody magic. Now my inbox is largly free of marketing.

Converstional view seems to work well in Gmail but I have to careful at work, some of the customers duck and dive email threads in an effort (I think) to break the email chain that has some info in it they don't want carried forward, I'm always good enough to paste it back into the chain so they can keep track ;)

In other news, Surface Pro 3 i7 is due here today, really looking forward to moving to it.
 
arad85 said:
Nah... folders are where you put things AFTER they have been processed ;)
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Nah

Too many emails. All regular email directed straight to folders and I work from Unread mail and flagged email folders.

[emoji12]
 
Choices are good to support ones workflow. Not having the choice at all and being forced in one particular way is quite ironic as that is what Windows users always acuse OS X off. Hence a total surprise to me that it doesn't let me.
 
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