It seems great, but I really need a 16GB RAM option. (At least they have the 512GB SSD)
With a couple of VMs, and a webbrowser, 8 GB can get tiny, and those machines don't evolve, so I'd like to plan for a couple of years...
With a couple of VMs, and a webbrowser, 8 GB can get tiny, and those machines don't evolve, so I'd like to plan for a couple of years...
I kinda like the mid 1990's look. I think the best thing though is the more traditional keyboard. I really cannot stand the chiclet-style keyboards that have become all the rage.
On 13", all the RAMs are soldered on the boards.
The Asus Zenbook UX303LN has 12GB (it's better), but only 256GB of SSD.
I don't mind the price, I need a powerful tool.
It's tragically expensive to import, though.
I would love to find a 13" form factor convertible tablet PC that's just a bit bulkier than a Macbook Air, but has something equivalent to a Wacom stylus.
(EDIT, Actually, there are plenty of situations where more RAM but not more CPU would be of tremendous benefit.)
Either way, I'd say the high end computing market (which I'd say needing 16GB of RAM falls into, personally) is currently different from the ultra-light, ultra-portable market.
I mean, if you need 16GB, you probably need more than a low power dual core CPU anyway, and that's not realistically going to fit into the form factor of this machine today.
[2] http://www.bto.eu/bto-x-book-13cl58-ips.html (click on "Zelf Samenstellen" tab to see self-configuration options)
I almost never run any VMs, but occasionally one to play around with other distros. I see a lot of people talking like running multiple VMs is the norm for devs, and I'm curious what people are doing that requires it on a regular basis.
When I have a couple of Visual Studio instances running, an instance or two of WinDbg, Firefox, IE, and RDC Manager with several connections open, I can start getting low memory warnings!
I was actually recently (in the past couple of weeks) in the market for a laptop and heavily considered this device as an option based on the very positive CES reports but the non-upgradable 8GB ram was a dealbreaker and I ended up with a bigger, uglier Toshiba (with more memory).
For me, I absolutely need a portable to replace my PC, since I don't have an office.
I guess spoiled here to have separate PCs for work (two 21" displays), home (24" display plus TV as second display), and a laptop for portable use. Using a small display laptop as my main box would be to limiting for me.
When I am running a VM or logged on to another PC remotely, I like to view it on a second display instead of switching back and forth...
It supports DisplayPort 1.2, which means I can Daisychain monitors. I plug in one DisplayPort cable and it connects to my 27" 1440p monitor and my 24" 1080p portrait monitor, giving me 3 separate displays to use.
These were reasons to down-vote me?
You should not boast about having two desktops and a laptop. Lots of people prefer a single machine setup and use very large servers or large external displays when needed. This usage pattern has got nothing to do with money constraints.
First, not all my VMs are for the same things.
A group of 8 of them is a set of build/test environments for a piece of open source software I am the author and maintainer of. They host different combinations of Linux distributions and kernels (the software is the userspace layer for a set of kernel modules), so that whenever I commit enough changes, I can just mass-run tests, code build and package builds accross those VMs. This is just run by a central Makefile on my local machine, and is more convenient than remotely using the build environment I have on my servers when on the go, sometimes using 3G WWAN, because of better latency saving me many seconds for each test build or when having totally unreliable uplink (train and plane mostly).
Then, I generally have about 5 to 10 VMs which hold customer environments, from simple standalone servers or clusters that I am currently prototyping, to full-blown network topologies with Linux/BSD server VMs connected to GNS3-powered emulated Cisco devices. I typically have copies of those on my servers too, but again, on the go, it is more convenient to have them running locally, again to speed up development cycle.
Of course, anything that requires long-running tests goes on my servers, not on the laptop. When at home (home office actually), I typically only use the VMs on my servers, fiber internet connection making working remotely with the datacenter seemless.
The paradox is that I have more things running on my laptop than on my desktop workstation, typically ~10-12GB of RAM for the VMs on my laptop, when my workstation 32GB are barely used at all (but used to be before I could afford to buy servers and host them somewhere nice) :-)
"Real work." Come on.