The Lenovo ThinkPad x230 is available with a good quality IPS display (though still widescreen and low-resolution). I own an x220 with the same IPS display, and I'm very happy with it.
I just recently got an x230 with the IPS option. The display is great and really comparable to my 11'' Air except for the coating. Overall, I love the machine. It lacks the size advantage of the Air (they are generally similar, but the x230 is several times thicker) but I was able to swap out the drive with a 256 SSD and upgrade the RAM to 16 GB which has left me with a machine that is way more capable than I anticipated. I also am really surprised by how much I like the keyboard.
That said, the ultrabook market is still in a weird state. I looked at all of the major vendors and no one really had the ideal combination of components yet. Once you can get the x230 with higher res display and a multi-core CPU, it'll be an ideal machine.
The only ultrabooks I can find with high res screen at the moment are either made by Asus or Sony. I've heard good things about the Asus UX31/32, full HD IPS displays (1920x1080) in a 13.3 inch laptop. A 12 inch laptop with 1600x900 would probably be ideal for me.
Yeah, it's the 1366x768, same as the Air. I saw better options from a few different vendors but it always came at the price of low end components elsewhere.
So you think one can like the new keyboard, right? I heard many long-time ThinkPad users were dissatisfied with the new keyboard. I'm on older X series and really contemplating whether I should get X220 or X230 in the future. Apart from the keybord type, why the hell do they dissolve the six-key Ins/Del/Home/End/PgUp/PgDn block ?!
If you don't use WWAN on your x230 (or even have the card), you can put an mSATA SSD into the M-PCIE socket. Then you can have an ssd for your OS, and a hard drive for mass storage.
I'm not sure how many developers are using 11" MBAs. 13" yes, but the 11" one is small and low-res enough that it's awkward for development (particularly development involving an IDE).
I have my X61t, with 1400x1050 res 12" display, hooked up to my HP IPS 24" 1920x1200 res display. It's a good combo for portable (yet usable res for real work) and then even better when it's docked at home.
my previous (bought in 2005) laptop was a dell inspiron 1440 that had a 1400x900 screen. when i replaced it (in 2009) the best i could do for a similar price and cpu performance was an inspiron 15 that had a 1366x768 resolution. it's not a matter of people being cheap, screen resolutions really have retrogressed.
Last time I bought the cheapest dell laptop with a discrete card it was maybe $600, now it appears to be $719. That's only on the 'small business' more brick-like ones, though. The 'consumer' ones don't even offer discrete, but hey you can get Skull Candy[TM] speakers for an up charge!
Even the cheapest comes with a dual core processor, though, so you can share your memory among 2 cores and an integrated graphics engine. Progress it ain't.
Joe Q Public had been subsidizing performance for quite some time. I think that era is ending because most of Joe's use cases can now be met with a ~1.5 Ghz arm tablet. I think the high end of the market is going to become more expensive unless a use case emerges where everyone wants that performance. Intels been hard at work trying to invent such a use case, but so far theres been little to show for it. Making games more realistic is one reasonable use case but those efforts have recently been stymied by content creation costs.
If people shopped smarter, they could find laptops with discrete graphics for significantly cheaper. After the deal I found, I'm paying about $420 for a system that comes with an i5 Ivy Bridge, 6gb RAM, NVidia 630M... And it came with a free bookbag to boot.
And what's so wrong about them? I bought those when I was a student and I was pretty happy with the result. They're very reasonable quality and they're definitely enough for any work that doesn't require 3d, or heavy virtualisation. They're also very likely to be supported by linux - a long time has passed since that hardware became available.
This plus their tried-and-true keyboards. I'm not sure if I like where the new keyboards are headed, I never thought I'd see the day where a T-series would have a chiclet keyboard!
Real keyboard + 16:10 hi-res, high quality display and real thinkpad (IBM era) build quality and I would be willing to pay north of $1500
I personally have moved on to widescreen (16:10 1680x1050 being my favorite) due to the ability to split the screen in a editor|browser or editor|pdf configuration (or two-pane editing).
They weren't hard to come by about half a year ago when I bought one. It came without a battery or AC adapter. I paid $256.
Edit - I just checked eBay and searched for "T61p". I found:
* A 4:3 T61p with an incorrect description for $500. That seems high.
* A 4:3 T61p missing its palmrest and other parts, auction only.
* A T61p in a T60 chassis with a QXGA panel, SSD and other upgrades for $1300. That sounds high unless you've tried to find a QXGA panel; they're over $400.
I miss 4:3 on X60s/X61s because it was so much smaller. I like how widescreen makes keyboard bigger though; I just wish for more portable laptop, more like Air but still user-configurable.
I don't mind the new keyboard. The crappy screens are really annoying. The new ones (T430) don't even have the correct ICC profile by default. I measure 2cm of bezel at the top and bottom (each - total 4cm) plus 1.5cm of bezel on the left and right sides (another 3cm of plastic). That would far better be used by actual screen.
(I actually wanted a 15" screen to replace my 15" T61 but the current 15" laptops are so frigging huge with so much wasted space that I had to downgrade.)
Better speakers wouldn't hurt either. I need them occasionally but when I do I am not content with them.
It seems like they aren't willing to make a no compromise product. Maybe there's a too little market for it?
