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What is the most MacBook Air-like Windows machine?

I have two that I use that are reasonable substitutes for my MBA considering weight, performance, and battery life (if not exactly form factor):

Toshiba R700 - Provided by my company. Very light and fast, great battery life and rapid start up under Win 7

HP Folio 13 - Faster than above but lacks two things the R700 has that I like: An always-on USB port for charging my phone in my backpack and a DVD drive.
 
bmwhd said:
I have two that I use that are reasonable substitutes for my MBA considering weight, performance, and battery life (if not exactly form factor):

Toshiba R700 - Provided by my company. Very light and fast, great battery life and rapid start up under Win 7

HP Folio 13 - Faster than above but lacks two things the R700 has that I like: An always-on USB port for charging my phone in my backpack and a DVD drive.
Click to expand...

Toshiba? This one? http://us.toshiba.com/computers/laptops/portege/R700/R700-S1330/

1600 dollars for 4GB of RAM, 128GB of SSD and a plastic casing? No USB 3.0? LESS RESOLUTION? No backlit keyboard? Plus it is fat.

No thanks.

The Air is the clear winner here.
 
Not suggesting the Toshiba is superior to the MBA.

The question was what laptops might not be too terrible to bear if you have to use Win.

The R700 is very light and decently fast so I don't hate it. That's all.
 
Actually, since recently I am also not quite sure which direction to go. I have no problems with Apple being slower in updating their Mac line, and since the topic are anyway MacBookAir's - this model has been updated recently, and from hardware point of view it is definitely good buy - except of the screen.

Namely, I earn for living developing on the Windows platform, and for everything else (and there is lots of it in this "else" :)), there is a Mac (I am happy owner of several Apple computers), and I simply enjoy the platform. So, initially I wanted to get the full-featured MBA (13"/i7/8GB/256GB SSD), and additionally to OSX install Windows 7 either direct on hardware under BootCamp, or to virtualize it using VMFusion.

However friend of mine recently bought ASUS Zenbook UX32VD, and this MBA clone, IMHO, has a lot better display than MBA's one... It is non-glare Full-HD IPS screen you really have to see yourself (Apple would call this Retina probably :)) - I was astonished! Apart of it, this machine is expandable, since you can replace its built-in HDD, and add more memory!

I am definitely not stating that the MBA's screen is a bad one, it is just that coding on a such high-resolution screen like it is this ASUS is just great experience. It is pity Apple didn't build such a good display from rMBP's in MBA's.

And yes, ASUS brutally copied everything from MBA making it, IMHO, almost better than the original. On the other hand, I read that some users are saying that its touchpad is not comparable to the one built in the MBA, but I would be ready to sacrifice little bit on the touchpad side for the great display.

Half a year ago it was more or less clear - there was simply no real alternative to MBA, but nowadays... I am really still not sure what to do. The only reason I would choose MBA now would be OSX - everything else speaks for Zenbook.

And please, my intention is not to start a flame war - just wanted to give my comment on the topic.
 
bmwhd said:
The question was what laptops might not be too terrible to bear if you have to use Win.
Click to expand...

Now ur aware u can run Win NATIVELY on the Air right? No emulation, no fakey, Windows has direct access to the Air's hardware.

It's kind of silly though to run Windows on a Mac, unless you have no choice of course. Play with OSX's smooth gesture controls and u would be hard pressed to not fall in love. Hard core linux users excluded.
 
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