The Best Ultraportable Laptop of 2012 [Battlemodo]
For a while now, ultraportables have been the only class of laptop that really matters. Sure, you can find more powerful machines for less money. But the mix of portability, speed, and beauty—along with the miniature muscle of Intel's Ivy Bridge chips—has made ultrabooks the best laptops to own for almost all of us. Problem was, this has been a class dominated by Apple. Not anymore. For the first time, there are multiple ultrabooks that even iSnobs couldn't justifiably roll their eyes at. And that's pretty exciting. We used these laptops as real people would use them. Yes, we ran synthetic benchmarks, punishing battery tests, and transfer speed evaluations. These things matter, but only insofar as they help separate a very close family of machines; these notebooks are more than a little similar to each other. All of the computers tested here have the signature benefits of an ultrabook—even the non "ultrabook" MacBook Air. Each is small, fast, and starts up and re...