We have talked about much worse things than that so I don't think that is really it. Even in the US we have some pretty strange and nasty porn, that doesn't mean that everyone in the US watches it. Sure I have heard of Two Girls one Cup and Goatse but I have never felt the need to look them up and I am sure that there are lots of people who have never even heard of them. Japan has its fair share of underground strange shit but for the most part everyone is pretty normal.

_ That stuff is not as prevalent as you would think. I have asked my Japanese friends and they have never even heard of it. Also I have yet to see a vending machine selling used woman's underwear.

In Japan there are not really any streaming services to speak of. There is no Netflix, Amazon, Prime, They just got Hulu but it is pretty limited. The Google Play Store now does rentals but I am not sure how popular it is. Sure you can pirate stuff online but subtitles in Japanese are a PIA to find and the Japanese shows don't show up on your normal torrent site. Plus they anti piracy laws here in Japan just got really strict.

While I agree with you, most things like that can be done with Group Policy and the things that can't can then be done with simple scripts managed by group policy. Macs and Linux machines are a slightly different ball game though.

I like the concept though, I would buy an Apple Thunderbolt display if they weren't as expensive as the MBA. Being able to connect a display, network, all external drives, etc all with one cable is pretty amazing. You would think that other companies would be all over this, as far as throughput goes USB 3.0 is sufficient for external HDD's but I am sure that HDD speeds will catch up to Thunderbolt.

That's what I had originally said, and it was a part of my decision. The MBA battery can be replaced although not as easy as an external battery.

From the iFixit tear down they said that the touchpad cable went under where the battery was glued down and there was a significant risk of damaging it if you tried to remove the battery.

Interesting, the iFixit tear down must have been after I made my choice. When I was looking checking them out everything said it was non upgradeable.

I am not dependent on either of them for day to day use so that is not really a problem. If my connection is not fast enough to listen to music or view photo's then I have bigger problems since I will not be able to work, all of my work is done remotely.

I can't tell if you are making a jab at the MBA for not having ethernet or trying to make a different point. Not having Ethernet is a bit of an issue but they do have an adapter, and that is fine with me. I only need to use a wired connection every once in a while and having a port on the laptop would make the profile much thicker.

Well, I'm in IT so most of what I do is remote support and everything else gets stored in the cloud.

Music - Google Music
Photos - Picasa
Docs - a combination of Google Docs and DropBox but those are mostly Excel and Word type documents so they don't take up much space.

Everything else gets stored on my media server at home. The only other thing that really takes up a lot of space is Steam games and I only install the ones I am playing and then delete the others when I am done.

With all of that said I still have 50GB of free space.

I do have a USB 3 external drive with a pair of old 5400RPM drives in a RAID0 that I use for some VM's when I need to do some migration tests but I only use that every so often.

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.