Holiday Gift Guide: Notebooks

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Notebook PCs are still very popular and key personal and productivity devices. Sure, smartphones and tablets might be the hotter products but a good notebook is something everyone can use. This season we're seeing the emergence of new convertible Ultrabooks, ever-thinner MacBook Pros with Retina Displays and even something unique from Google and Samsung in the Chromebook space.

Dell XPS 12 

One of the first Ultrabook convertibles from Dell, the XPS 12 morphs from a touch-enabled ultraportable notebook to a full-featured Windows 8 tablet. The genius is all in Dell's unique hinge design, something they borrowed from their netbook line. The screen pops out and swivels so it is facing outwards when the notebook is closed.

Build quality and finish on the XPS 12 is superb and can be best described as business class. The 12.5” Full HD (1080p) 400-nit display is bright and gorgeous while the latest Intel Core processors and 128GB SSD drives keep it competitive with the rest of the Ultrabook class. Still on pre-order status from Dell.ca, the XPS 12 starts at $1200 and will begin shipping in mid-January of 2013.

Google Chromebook by Samsung

If the new Google Chromebook looks a lot like an 11-inch MacBook Air, that is because they share a lot of design cues. From the chiclet keyboard, to the angular styling, it is hard to tell the two subnotebooks apart at first glance. While the MacBook Air starts at $1000, the Chromebook only costs $250.

For that price you get the first notebook running Chrome on a Samsung Exynos ARM processor which is a tablet and smartphone processor designed for low battery consumption. Running Google's browser based Chrome OS, the Chromebook is ideal for users who spend most of their online lives in their browsers using cloud services like GMail, Docs, YouTube and the like. At 2.4 pounds and capable of a 6.5 hour battery life, the Chromebook is extremely portable. The only limitation is that it needs to be connected to the Internet at all times to be truly useful. The Chromebook is also only sold in the US and the UK so it will take some maneuvering to get one into Canada.

Apple 13-Inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display

Much more down to earth in price and size than its 15-inch brother at $1600, the thinner and lighter 13-inch MacBook Pro ups the ante on Apple's most popular notebook with the stunning Retina Display, a much lighter body and Intel's latest Core i5 and i7 processors, 8GB of RAM and 7-hours of battery life.

The Pièce de résistance here is the splendid 13-inch display with that 2560-by-1600 native resolution at 227 pixels per inch. Putting this display into a much lower price point. Great for professionals who want the resolution but find the 15-inch Pro too large and even better for consumers upgrading from an older MacBook Pro. The perfect blend of the MacBook Air's slimline style and the MacBook Pro's power, the new 13-inch MacBook Pro might just be the sweet spot in price and size for prosumers.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon

An Ultrabook unlike any other, the X1 Carbon (starting at $1,320.00) is a premium business-class portable that has the ThinkPad DNA of durability and efficiency while maintaining all the features that matter in the Ultrabook class. There's no whiff of the shameless copying of the MacBook Air's black keyboard, aluminum enclosure and black-bordered display that many Ultrabooks are so obvious about. This is a ThinkPad through and through and proudly so.

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon looks and feels reassuringly like a ThinkPad, it is clad in black Carbon Fiber top cover and rollcage and features the all-around rubberized finish that ThinkPad’s have had for years now.  

Exceedingly light, thin and easy to carry, the X1 Carbon is around 3 lbs., which is remarkable considering that it actually features a 14-inch screen and a battery that is capable of churning out 8.2 hours of use.