Interesting, I wasn't aware of that. I am still happy with my MBA since I wanted to give OSX a try but that would have really made the choice between the x1 Carbon and the MBA much more difficult. Lenovo makes great workhorses that take a beating but the Apple laptops tend to look a little nicer and hold their value. Although Lenovo laptops really look nicer for business. I will tell you one thing though, I will never go back to a full size laptop. I love the portability of the MBA. I had to fix a friends 1 year old 13" MBP and the thing felt like a ton of bricks.

The RAM in the ZenBook is soldered in and maxes out at 4GB. You can get the MBA with 8GB of RAM, also the HDD will be replaceable once 3rd party OEM's start making them. It isn't glued or soldered down or anything like that, however the 128GB drive is more than enough for me since I only had a 60GB SSD on my old laptop.

Retina MBP has the glued battery not the MBA

I tend to run VM's for testing different server configurations so I need a lot of RAM plus I would rather not be stuck with 4GB when the RAM is not upgradeable. The ZenBook and other UltraBooks as thin as the MBA don't have upgradeable RAM either. Weight was a major consideration for me, I comute an hour and a half one way each day. I walk about a 1km to the train station and ride the train for an hour and walk to the office, I got really tired of carrying a conventional laptop. Now I have to double check my MBA is even in the bag because it is so light.

I have worked with Lenovo X series laptops a few years ago and they were always a bit under powered but I imagine that is no longer a problem. I looked at the ThinkPad X1 Carbon but is was significantly more expensive than the MBA.

I was in the market for an Ultra Light laptop since I was tired of lugging mine around for 3 hours everyday. I have never been a huge Apple fan so I looked at the Asus ZenBook but it maxes out at 4GB of RAM, I looked at the new Lenovo carbon fiber ultra book but it was hundreds of dollars more expensive. I checked out a few other UltrBooks but they all just looked and felt cheap. When the new MacBook Air's came out I weighed the pro's and con's, sure the RAM is not replaceable but neither is the RAM on the ZenBook and the MBA can take 8GB. The HDD will eventually be upgradeable whenever a third party makes one and the battery is much more replaceable than the Retina MBP. The USB 3.0 supports SCSI over USB protocol and there are a number of other hardware advantages. Although I wanted to punch a hole in the wall when I had to buy a Thunderbolt cable for $50 0_o, there is no reason they should be that expensive but that is Apple pricing for you. Coming from Linux it took me a while to get used to OSX and its limitations but overall I am pretty happy with my purchase and would make it again. You can't find an UltraBook for that price with the same specs and build quality.

Sure, like Amazon or Microsoft hasn't had internal infrastructure issues either. Mistakes happen, things get overlocked, and then fixed. I am more interested in what their lessons learned were and what they have done to prevent a similar incident in the future.

From TFA: The verdict form [PDF] and the jury instructions [PDF] specifically asked them to address that very question. Here's what he said, starting with the question from Demon-Xanth: Demon-Xanth: Did you have the opportunity to ask "Is this something that should be patentable?" during the trial? Velvin Hogan @Demon-Xanth No, however it was not the function of this jury to ask that. We were bound to use the law as it is today. The patents were issued the judge instructed us not to second guess the current patent system.

Vista was a buggy POS and so many things were broken that it was not useable as an IT administrator. Windows 7 is great because they had a chance to iron out all of the bugs. It is expected when you make such a radical shift, but I don't see why MS wants to make such a huge UI change just for the sake of change. For a tablet, sure go nuts I just don't know why they want to push an interface on people that don't even want it on a phone. I suppose it is a way for them to use their market position on the desktop to get people used to the "Metro" interface so people will buy Windows phones. I can see why they would think that is a good idea but I am fairly sure it is going to back fire in a big ... big way.

Until I can have the board from Back to the Future ::YAWN::