Lightest Laptops on the Market

[user1397]

I am looking for lightweight laptops for my sister, who suffers from some back problems after a car accident.

She's liking the macbook air, although that's quite out of her price range, so I'm looking for alternatives.

Ideally, I am looking for a decently-specc'd laptop (not a netbook) that is good for browsing, word processing, watching movies online, other multimedia, etc

Thanks in advance.

[dyous87]

The 11.6 inch Asus Zenbook seems nice. Its just about as thin and light as the 11.6 inch MacBook Air and its about 250.00 cheaper then the similarly speced Mac.

David

[LowSky]

Models that don't have Disk drives tend to weigh less. Smaller batteries lower the weight too, but then you sacrifice up time. If you stay under 15" screen laptops weigh very little. And the Macbook Air is a $1100 netbook. Apple can say whatever it wishes but it is.

You don't really mention a price point, so I'll give you some bad news. Lighter cost more. Your best bet is going into local store and "weighing" the options. Pun Intended.

One suggestion is the Lenovo X-series. Very light and can be cheap if you stay with the base models, X120 and X130 series. The X1 and X220 are very expensive.

[dyous87]

I don't think it's fair to call the MacBook Air a netbook. Netbooks tend to have low power processors along the lines of an Intel Atom.

The MacBook line now comes with either an i5 or i7 and can go up to 6 gigs of ram. That's not quite a netbook. It's actually along the power of a middle of the line notebook and with the dual core i7 and 6 gigs of ram it is actually quite powerful.

[LowSky]

I don't think it's fair to call the MacBook Air a netbook. Netbooks tend to have low power processors along the lines of an Intel Atom.

The MacBook line now comes with either an i5 or i7 and can go up to 6 gigs of ram. That's not quite a netbook. It's actually along the power of a middle of the line notebook and with the dual core i7 and 6 gigs of ram it is actually quite powerful.

Apple doesn't build cheap computers. and compared to their other lines the Air is under powered and lacking many normal (Apple) PC features. That i7 isn't the same one in the MacBook Pro line. Its a ULV chip. And anything with a screen under 13 inches and no disk drive its a netbook. Yeah I said it.

[KiwiNZ]

Models that don't have Disk drives tend to weigh less. Smaller batteries lower the weight too, but then you sacrifice up time. If you stay under 15" screen laptops weigh very little. And the Macbook Air is a $1100 netbook. Apple can say whatever it wishes but it is.


Wrong

The MacBook Air has a 1.7ghz i5 3mb Level3 cache or a 1.8 ghz i7 , 4GB 1333mhz DDR3 Ram. It is NOT a netbook.

[chenr1]

acer has some pretty good light netbooks. And they are really good too. Because acer specializes in netbooks.

[dyous87]

Apple doesn't build cheap computers. and compared to their other lines the Air is under powered and lacking many normal (Apple) PC features. That i7 isn't the same one in the MacBook Pro line. Its a ULV chip. And anything with a screen under 13 inches and no disk drive its a netbook. Yeah I said it.

That's just plain wrong. I have a 11.6 inch alienware with a Mobility Radeon 1gig, an intel i7 and 6 gigs of RAM. There is no way you can call this a netbook.

A netbook is a subcompact computer (originally less then 11 inches) with a low powered processor intended for simple web browsing, emailing and document editing. A netbook for all intents and purposes served much of the same purposes that tablets now do (minus the apps of course).

Size alone does not make a computer a netbook. As you can probably tell my Alienware which plays Skyrim on Medium high settings is definately not a netbook.

While the MacBook Air may be expensive for the specs, its specs are still well above the specs of even the best netbook on the market.

[|{urse]

most all acer laptops are actually designed and manufactured by clevo.

- The thinnest 17.3" 100watt GPU laptop in the world

http://www.clevo.com.tw/en/products/prodinfo.asp?productid=340

[Haventfoundme]

Battery weight and SSD. Other than that you have to research this. Anyone want to argue that discrete graphics eats up battery life? I'm pretty sure you can find something for less than $500.