Is the MacBook Air overpriced? Competitive offerings from Dell and Toshiba reveal that the MacBook Air may not be so extortionately expensive.
A MacBook Air rival, Dell's Latitude E4200 starts at 2.2 pounds for about the same price.
(Credit: Dell)Of course, it all depends on your perspective: $2,499 for a laptop is a lot of money. But put the Air into the context of its product category--ultraportable laptop--and you see that, by comparison, it's not necessarily overpriced.
(Note: Here we're talking about the just-announced update to the MacBook Air.)
Let's start with Dell's recently announced ultraportable laptop (or 'subnotebook," choose your nomenclature). The 12.1-inch Latitude E4200 is priced at $2,495 configured with a 128GB solid state drive, 2GB of memory, an Intel Core 2 Duo ULV SU9400 processor running at 1.4GHz, the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD, and a 6-cell battery.
(Note: I am not going to draw a comparison with the Dell Latitude E4300 as it does not fall into the category of an ultrathin--less than 0.8 inch thick--laptop the way the E4200 and Air do.)
How do the Air's features fare by comparison? Pretty well. The $2,499 Air also includes a 128GB solid state drive and 2GB of memory. That's where the apples-to-apples comparison ends (pun not intended). It bests the Dell in two significant areas. Despite being less than 0.8 inch thick like the E4200, it uses a more-powerful 1.86GHz Intel processor and Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics. This is a crucial difference for some users who want the portability but need more horsepower.
That said, let me state the obvious: heat will always be an issue when a relatively high-speed processor is squeezed into a very small space. That's why, presumably, Dell, Toshiba (below) and Lenovo (X301 ThinkPad) have all opted for more power-frugal ULV (ultra-low-voltage) Intel processors. The Air does not use a ULV processor.
Form factors: The Air uses a larger 13.3-inch display and is slightly wider than the Dell overall, as this video shows. The bigger screen and wider keyboard can be an advantage or disadvantage. Apple may strike a better balance of weight and keyboard/screen size, but you get more portability (based on specified weight) with the Dell.
Apple does not bundle, as standard, an external media drive with the Air, however. Dell does. That weighs in Dell's favor.
The E4200 also beats the Air on ports. Packing in 1394, VGA, RJ-45, USB, and eSATA/USB Combo ports. And a docking connector. (No docking station for the Air.)
Toshiba's new ultraportable, the Portege R600, is also a close rival (based on a feature comparison only) to both the Air and the E4200. Like the Dell, this comes with a 12-inch screen, the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD, and a 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo ULV SU9400 processor (lower performance than the Air's).
Like the E4200 and Air, it can be configured with a 128GB solid state drive.
Unlike the E4200 and the Air, it squeezes in an optical drive into a form factor less than 0.8 inch thick--in its favor. And offers 3GB of memory as standard, more than the E4200 and the Air.
The R600 also beats the Air on ports. With VGA, 3 USB ports, and an eSATA/USB combo port, in addition to a docking connector.
And the price: $2,999 for the version of the Portege R600 with a 128GB SSD. That's about $500 more than the Air and E4200, so you pay for the extra functionality in that ultraslim form factor. (Correction: the price spread is $500--not $600 as originally stated.)
(For those readers who may want to compare the Sony Vaio ultraportable to the Air go here to see the Vaio TT series. And here's a CNET review of the ThinkPad X301.)
Solid-state drives, if not yet ubiquitous, have arrived. You can find them in laptops big and small and as a high-octane storage option for gaming PCs.
Alienware 128GB SSD option adds $550 but on the Dell XPS M1530 this option adds only $450.
(Credit: Alienware)SSDs made their mark by appearing in the trendiest ultraportables like the Apple MacBook Air and Asus Eee PC--typically as stratospherically priced options, fashion statements rarely seen in the real world.
These drives are now coming off their rarefied shelf space and appearing across a wider range of laptops and ultraportable computers.
Any new, lightweight enterprise laptop worth its salt comes with a large-capacity solid-state drive option now. Hewlett-Packard recently introduced the 3-pound EliteBook 2530p with an Intel 80GB solid-state drive option and Dell this month announced the 2.2-pound Dell E4200 with a 128GB drive.
Dell E4200 ultraportable can be configured with 128GB SSD
(Credit: Dell Computer)Dell also offers solid-state drives on more mainstream laptops such as the 15-inch XPS M1530 laptop. The SSD option on the M1530 is twice the capacity and half the price of drives offered to date: 128GB for $450. The first generation of solid-state drives in the MacBook Air, for example, added almost $1,000 to the cost for only 64GB of storage. Dell lists it as an "Ultra Performance" M1530 option.
Solid-state drives are almost synonymous with the new category of tiny laptops called netbooks. And the category continues to grow. Lenovo is the latest high-profile entry. Earlier this month the China-based company introduced the IdeaPad S10 with a 4GB solid-state drive option.
More notable is the 10-inch Asus Eee PC 1000 that comes with a 40GB solid-state drive and that's priced at just under $700.
HP VP Keith LeFebvre holds a new EliteBook 2530p ultraportable. The laptop comes with an Intel 80GB SSD. Larger 160GB drives from Intel are expected in the fourth quarter.
(Credit: Intel)In the gaming space, solid-state drives are just beginning to be aggressively marketed as the ultimate high-performance storage option. Last week at the Intel Developer Forum, Chris Saleski from Intel's Storage Technologies Group demonstrated an Intel 80GB X25M solid-state drive crushing 7,200-rpm, 500GB Seagate Barracuda drives in benchmarks. The single Intel drive hit 44,000 IOPS (input-output operations per second), while the Seagate array did under 550 IOPS.
If this benchmark holds up in the real world, solid-state drives could catch on at game PC makers like Falcon Northwest, which demonstrated its FragBoxes at the Intel forum also beating high-performance hard-disk drives.
Dell's Alienware game PC unit currently offers a 128GB solid-state option for $550 on its Area-51 M15x laptop. "Solid state drives are the best performance options Alienware offers hardcore gamers," Alienware said in a statement. "These drives offer them shorter load times and faster access rates that put them at a much higher level of performance than traditional hard drives."
Alienware currently offers up to a 256GB SSD in a "RAID 0" configuration.
Hewlett-Packard on Monday announced three notebooks, one as light as 3 pounds, that will use upcoming Intel low-power chips and solid-state drives.
HP 2530p is just over three pounds
(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)The EliteBook 2530p and 2730p replace the current 2510p and 2710p models. The biggest changes are a brushed, anodized aluminum exterior casing, new wireless broadband modules, the use of upcoming Intel 45-nanometer ultra-low-voltage (ULV) processors, and the option for an 80GB solid-state drive.
HP will replace current low-power Intel processors with upcoming 45nm processors, said Keith LeFebvre, vice president and general manager for business notebooks, HP PSG Americas. However, LeFebvre did not specify which low-power processor models it will offer because Intel has not announced these chips.
The newest power-stingy Core 2 Duo mobile chips are due in September and range in speed from 1.4GHz for a 10-watt chip to 2.4GHz for a 25-watt version. All will compare favorably to mainstream Intel mobile chips that typically have a power envelope of 35 watts.
New solid-state drives will also debut in both the 2530p and 2730p--HP will offer an 80GB solid-state drive as an option. To date, the largest capacity that HP offered was 64GB. The newest wave of SSDs coming from Micron, Intel, and Samsung are faster and more reliable than the first generation of drives used in ultraportables such as the MacBook Air and ThinkPad X300, according Avi Cohen, managing partner at Avian Securities.
The 1.8-inch hard-disk drives have also been upgraded. Typically these tiny drives have been a bottleneck because they run at a sluggish 4200rpm. New 1.8-inch drives will run at 5400rpm and there will also be an option for a 7200rpm 2.5-inch drive in the slightly larger 2230s EliteBook series, said LeFebvre.
New wireless broadband modules will not be wedded to one single provider--a gotcha with previous generations of HP business notebooks. HP will offer built-in Gobi technology from Qualcomm that uses a single module, the HP un2400, to support multiple mobile broadband network technologies and mobile operators.
HP will also include as standard HP QuickLook2 software that provides instant access to e-mail, calendar, task, and contact information without having to boot the system.
Both the EliteBook 2530p and 2730p feature a mercury-free Illumi-Lite LED display, which is lighter and more energy-efficient than standard notebook display technology.
A slightly heavier line of EliteBook 2230s models are available now and weigh in at about 4 pounds. The 2230s offers faster processors--up to a Core 2 Duo T9600 running at 2.8GHz--and 7200rpm hard-disk drives.
The HP EliteBook 2530p and HP EliteBook 2730p are expected to be available by early September, with estimated starting U.S. street pricing of $1,499 and $1,670, respectively. The HP Compaq 2230s is currently available at an estimated starting U.S. street price of $999.
Windows Vista Business 32 is standard in all models.
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