Tim Bajarin has written an interesting article for PC Magazine, Laptops Reach the Holy Grail, talking about ultraportable laptops hitting the “sweet” spot of computing, weighing around or under 3 pounds and having a “two-spindle system” containing both a hard drive and an optical drive. As he points out, most that are in the 3 pound class do not have optical drives (although smaller/thinner optical drives are starting to come out).
Excerpts from the article:
these days the real stars of the personal computing world are ultraportables, laptops that weigh less than 3 pounds. All of the major vendors have laptops in this range, but they comprise less than 12 percent of all laptops sold.
…… That brings us to the holy grail of laptop computing—a two-spindle system (a laptop that integrates both a hard drive and optical drive) that weighs less than 3 pounds. We haven’t seen such a system . . . until now.
Recently, I was pleasantly surprised when Toshiba showed me its new Portégé R500. It’s clearly the lightest no-compromise ultraportable available today. I have been lobbying laptop vendors to make something like this for five years, and, finally, we have a laptop that has a powerful processor (a 1.2-GHz Intel Core Duo), weighs well under 3 pounds, and integrates both a hard drive and an optical drive.
Ultraportable laptops mentioned in the article:
– Toshiba Portege R200
– Toshiba Portege R500
– Lenovo ThinkPad X60