Ever since affordable-TV-mainstay Vizio entered the PC market
If you’re buying a new laptop this holiday season, you should probably get a MacBook Air. Its build quality is best-in-breed, its 12-15 hour battery life (on the 13" model) absolutely embarrasses the competition, and its operating system is extremely reliable and polished. Plus, despite what you may have heard about Apple products, it’s actually quite affordable compared to the competition.
There’s an old joke about a doctor giving an elderly patient some good news and bad news. "Give me the bad news first," the old guy says. "OK, you’ve got cancer and you’re dying. Best case, you have a few years left." "Oh god, that’s awful," cries the old man. "What’s the good news?" "Well," says the doctor, "You’re in the best shape of your life, and your dementia means you won’t remember any of this in a few hours." And that is, essentially, the Windows laptop renaissance.
We’d been waiting on this one—the Zenbook is finally getting a refresh. And for whatever reason, Asus has decided to cover one of the prettier ultrabooks out there in a sheet of Gorilla Glass. Which, hey, sure.
There is no joy in the Sony Vaio Pro. For a laptop that is, in substance, elegant and powerful, that’s strange. It’s pretty and sleek and slim, but somehow with none of the joie de vivre that typically comes along with that.
Laptops are at a point right now where they should all be more or less excellent. Ultrabooks are into their third year of relevance, and the screens and processors that are widely available are good enough that you can piecemeal together a perfectly acceptable laptop from chaff, more or less. So making a great one is about decisions. The Acer Aspire S7 made a bunch of good ones, against just a few dumb ones. And the result puts it in the vanguard of what’s shaping up to be a belated PC renaissance.