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Comment by nohat | Hacker News Reader

The problem with the article he quotes is that it is wrong about the price of the x220. The x220 with default specs on everything except the bluetooth, webcam, ips screen (much nicer than an air btw), 128 GB ssd, and most expensive wifi (includes wimax) is $1290.60 . The ars article claims $1999.

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But that's a limited-time promotional discount. They are reporting the usual price.

http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2011/09/ultrabook-intel...

That's not quite fair either - adding to the complexity of pc purchases is the dizzying array of weekly specials. It's entirely normal for a vendor to mark stuff down from week to week.

Good point. You may not care for Apple's prices, but you know they will be exactly the same between all outlets almost all the time. There are obvious windows of exception, like just before a keynote, but those are pretty well marked.

Ah, thanks for pointing that out. The sale price is still is an important point that the article doesn't mention, and the discount was active when the article was published. Maybe I've gotten jaded, but when I see a 'limited time major discount' I don't think of the official pre sale price as being the actual price.

I've never seen the x220 not on sale. Lenovo has these inflated prices that last for about 2 months when the system comes out. Then every week is a sale. Talk with a salesperson and you can usually even get a lower price.

I don't like the business model, but Lenovo thinks it works for them.

(FWIW: Thinkpad T420 owner, and I love it much more than my 13 inch MBP.)

Having owned an X201, test-driven an X220, and having sold the X201 in favor of the 11" Air, I have to disagree - the X220's screen isn't as nice as the Air's. The backlight on the Air can be made about as dim, but also much brighter, and color seems a decent bit more accurate (though that could be that Windows's color management sucks, while OS X's is pretty good).

Was that the ips display? IPS is used by graphic designers because it has higher contrast and better color fidelity (and viewing angle). Not sure about screen brightness though, and the response time is less.

Agreed, must not have been the IPS he used, while that's what the OP referenced. I've got an 11" MBA, and the display, while better than my EeePC, is certainly inferior to any IPS panel I've ever owned or used.

The IPS screen on my X220 is worse than any other IPS display I have ever seen.

You can get a TN panel in an X series machine? I didn't look, but the viewing angle and contrast of the X220 I had the chance to use seemed to naturally indicate IPS. But the color fidelity was not as solid as my Air's and the brightness, as I said, was not as wide-ranging.

(And IPS isn't just used by graphics designers. :p This said by somebody who just dropped way too much money to upgrade his bargain-basement TN desktop monitors to IPS...)

True, I bought an X220 (IPS, 80GB mSata, 320GB HDD, 8GB of RAM) in Switzerland. I paid about 1100 Swiss Francs (Imported from Germany). A MacBook Air would have cost me much more.

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