Ultrabooks, anybody have one? have thoughts?

[dorayme]

I don't get out much. . . this weekend I landed at Best Buy to pick up a home "cloud" storage to backup our laptops and the kids desktop. I saw a few Ultrabooks. . . I got a little lusty. I'm not in the market for a PC at the moment so I have plenty of time to make a decision but I was intrigued for when my laptop dies. Any of you who are serious about your computer have any thoughts or information to share. Please use layman's terms. I'm not very the most computer literate.

[rabergnc]

I am using a MacBook Air - Apple's version of that type of machine. (Ultrabooks have to have a specific processor to be called "ultrabook"). The basic idea is the same. A light, easily portable computer which is powerful enough to handle most of the things you would do with a traditional laptop. The biggest thing is the lack of an optical drive and do not have a traditional hard drive - they use solid state drives - chips. Some machines has fewer ports (USB connections).

All that said, I have been using my machine for about 1.5 years and would not go back to a regular laptop. I have never missed having an optical drive and for what I do, the solid state drive (128GB) is more than adequate. I do web surfing, email, word processing, some spreadsheet word, some powerpoint presentations when traveling. I occasionally have a movie or a few tv programs on board to watch when traveling. I remove them when I am done as they tend to take a good deal of space in onboard storage. Much of the material I use is "in the cloud" - in dropbox or google docs.

Truth be told, these days I travel with my ipad more than my laptop. The ipad now can do most of what I need easily. In the last year, the only time I will have brought my MB Air is on an upcoming trip where I will need the ability to access a couple of websites which require the use of flash which is not possible with the ipad. (I prefer the ipad since it can go most of the day on a single battery charge where the MB Air needs to be fed after about 5 hours. The newer ultrabooks may have better battery life.)

Bottom line - unless you needs gobs and gobs of immediately available storage and an optical drive or are doing highly graphics intensive work, you will likely be able to do nicely with an ultrabook.

[dorayme]

Somehow I missed your post. Thank you. I use our first gen. iPad for most of my daily web surfing, but sometimes I do prefer a keyboard, and as you said, sometimes I need flash. Thank you for describing what the ultrabook/mba is mostly designed to do. It fits with what I need for it to do I will probably be waiting until my laptop actually is closer to dying before getting one, but it's good to know.

[pretzelb]

I'd agree with rabergnc. You really just need to take note of what you really do with your laptop and then (if you don't know the tech specs) ask around on what kind of power you need. Most people really don't need a ton of power as they just email, surf, and do light document editing. Movies can be a drain on space but other than that the majority of users don't push the limits of a laptop.

I do think a keyboard is a must if you are going to need to do any serious typing. My friends and family might be OK with me not spelling things correctly but everyone else requires attention to detail and I find a keyboard much faster and more accurate.

What is interesting is what will a tablet and ultrabook user do on a trip? The ultrabooks are more versatile IMO (but I don't own one) and really not much bigger than a tablet (or enough to really make it a hard choice). Bringing both seems like overkill to me but I guess if it's a big family that might keep peace to have an extra. Then again I still bring my Kindle and iPad even though I could just use the iPad for reading.