If anyone has any ideas, this is what I'm looking for, roughly in the order of importance:
$800-1200 CAD before tax and shipping
5 hours MINIMUM of battery life of browsing with wifi.
Under four pounds
12.5" to 14" screen
Built well (I need it to last at least three years)
Good keyboard
Good touchpad
Haswell or Ivy Bridge with switchable discrete graphics
IPS Screen
8GB RAM
1600x900 resolution or higher
256GB SSD (Can be upgraded on laptops that don't have everything soldered to the motherboard)
Gigabit Ethernet (USB 3.0 adapter would be alright)
The MBA looks awesome, though it's going to cost me something like $1800 (After HST) after upgrading to 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD, but still won't have gigabit Ethernet built in.
An X230 gets very close, right now will cost me an even $1000 with Windows 8 Pro and an IPS screen. Then I'll just spend $260 on another 4GB stick of RAM and a 256GB Samsung 840. Though it won't be Haswell...
The Asus and Samsung ultrabooks shown off look really nice, though they look expensive and pricing hasn't been announced. I could probably deal with a 128GB SSD if I had a 2560 x 1440, though I'd still want 8GB RAM since I want to run VMs.
Some laptops get pretty close, though then the battery life is like 4 hours on low brightness and wifi turned off. This is going to be thrown in my backpack and used around school and when I go to a friend's or my mom's place, so at the maximum I'd be carrying around a spare battery. Though for my current laptop (Latitude E4300) I like that I can go a normal day at school or visit to my mom's without worrying about the battery slice. Though if I want to do some gaming, run heavy software or study with people after school, I have the option of clipping on the battery slice to double my runtime to about 10-11 hours.
I've had a lot of shitty laptop screens, so having IPS to match my three monitors attached to the desktop would be appreciated.
Vaio Pro maybe
Are you looking for something like a Quadro as it's for CAD?
I mainly want something with enough graphics performance for the very occasional game of TF2 or CS:GO, though I don't want to get a massive gaming laptop when I'm maybe going to play once every two weeks.
[QUOTE=benjgvps;41347106]I mainly want something with enough graphics performance for the very occasional game of TF2 or CS:GO, though I don't want to get a massive gaming laptop when I'm maybe going to play once every two weeks.[/QUOTE]
Well then, if you look for something with HD Graphics 5100 you will be able to do that comfortably.
TF2 has a glitch with NVidia Optimus and you will most likley get better performance with the integrated (my HD4000 gets the same if not higher FPS as my 650M @1920x1080).
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