£500-650 Ultrabook/Compact laptop/Hybrid

nine_tails · 27 Dec 2015 at 19:27

Hi Guys,

Missus wants a new laptop as her Macbook died (4-5 years old).
What she really needs it for is basic surfing/email/MS office.
Some basic video editing (nothing major).

Certainly needs to be portable she travels way too much , and would need it to be light in weight.

Sort of looking at surface pro 3, but i am not sure if it is a good build for travelling. I guess ideal size would be 12-14".

Cheers!

scoobyrichuk · 30 Dec 2015 at 13:24

I would recommend an Asus UX305, I've had mine for 6 months and it's been fantastic. I paid £650 at John Lewis but you can get it for £550 on the high street...

pepp77 · 30 Dec 2015 at 13:27

I bought my mum a Dell Inspiron 13 - 7348 2-in-1 Laptop.

i7, 8GB Ram and SSD. Laptop with Touchscreen and a tablet mode.

There are two on the Dell outlet at the moment (where I got my mums from) from £550 to £666

Edit - Also just seen Lenovo have an i7 Yoga unit (white in colour) for £600.

nine_tails · 3 Jan 2016 at 00:07

@Scooby cheers mate. We took a look at it. Slightly disappointed by the processor being an M one.

Two more devices caught my eye.

HP Spectre x360 : i5-5200U/4GB RAM/128 GB SSD : £699.97
HP pavillion x360: i5-6200U/8GB RAM/128 GB SSD : £499.00

I am going wtf at the pavillion being so cheap given its a skylake i5 in there. Am i missing something here ?

@pepp cheers, look at the yoga 3. Atleast from the comparisions, i can see that the 5500U is on par with 6200U.

Really do not understand early Mac air 2015 in at about £750.

Another consideration is the Lenovo YOGA 500 14" : i5 6200U/8GB RAM/8 GB SSD + GeForce 920M @ £599.00.
920M might come in handy when doing some video work.

What do you guys think?

Cheers!

nine_tails · 4 Jan 2016 at 18:15

Sorry to bump guys any clues. The model listed is S150sa , strangely I am unable to locate it directly on HP website, but can manage a google link to a HP site corner. I am worried this is some retailer only special vesion where i will get screwed over something.

deshepherd · 4 Jan 2016 at 19:04

scoobyrichuk said:
I would recommend an Asus UX305, I've had mine for 6 months and it's been fantastic. I paid £650 at John Lewis but you can get it for £550 on the high street...

I've also got a UX305 and would also recommend it (unless you need serious CPU power). And luckily I managed to get mine when JL had it at £499 and as I had an almost 6 year old Compaq 311c that I'd not used for a couple of years I got £100 back from the MS trade in scheme!

Given you mention video editing the that may rule this model out ... especially as the 128GB SSD would fill soon with video files!

I got it because it has a Full HD display and I use it to login to my work VNC sessions (which are set up for FHD monitors on my office PC) from home - for this, browising, email, iplayer etc the UX305 is great.

Process is an ultra-low-power M model (though note latest Macbook Air, I think, uses a very similiar process) - headline frequency is only 800MHz but in turbo mode this ramps up to 2GHz and evidence of a review I read was that the UX305 manages to maintain this frequiency through most of the benchmarks they used and didn't slow down from thermal throttling. On the positive side it means the UX305 has no fan so is very thin and silent.