Lenovo U350

My new U350

I bought this laptop after my tablet broke. Because it was an unexpected purchase I wanted to buy a cheaper laptop. I bought it from Amazon for $500 (six months after I bought it it is $650). I also wanted a thin and light one after seeing my advisor carry his MacBook Air around in China. It turns out that this would have been better than many more expensive laptops! First of the laptop is thin and light; especially compared to my T4220, this weighs almost nothing. Because I carry my laptop with me everywhere this is a big deal. It has both a VGA and a HDMI port for hooking up to displays without requiring a silly adapter (like a certain competitor). It has an Ethernet port which is still important in some parts of the world (ie. my summer at Deutsche Bahn) as well as speedy LAN transfers. It has 3 USB ports which is fairly sufficient, along with a SD card slot. The keyboard is full size, and nice. The only thing I miss sometimes are media buttons for quickly pausing music or skipping to the next song and the trackpad mouse button is to mushy. It runs a lot cooler than my tablet. It has a "Pentium" processor, but it is a modern Intel ULV processor; Intel just brands it poorly to try and get people to upgrade away from it.

This is not the machine you are looking for for 3D gaming or video editing. But I have a desktop, so I never need to do these tasks on my laptop. I am perfectly happy with the processing power, it works well enough for Photoshop which I use. No disk drive either, but this is not an issue for me. I only purchase digital software and media downloads, so I only need to use a CD/DVD about once a year. You can buy a ~$50 external drive or rip the ISO on my desktop and then transfer it over.

The way I look at it; this is 1/3 the price of a MacBook Air and it has more ports and Windows so it fits my needs better.

Coupled with my move away from tablets as a result of Learning to Learn at MIT, I actually like this laptop more than my old tablet. I highly recommend this machine.