Ultra Portable Laptops
What's the best light laptop on the market today?
Apple certainly ended its 2020 with a bang. In true Steve Jobs fashion, it released newer MacBook Air and MacBook Pro 13-inch models that are more powerful than ever at its ‘One More Thing’ event.
That in and of itself is nothing new, as the Cupertino-based company has recently been giving its ultra-portable laptops an update every year. What does make this new round of updates notably different, however, is the fresh-from-the-oven M1 chip that is now powering both svelte laptops. And its timing couldn’t have been more perfect.
That isn’t to say that Intel and its host of ultrabooks have been letting things slide. Intel’s new Evo platform, the evolution of Project Athena, has also ushered in a new class of impressive laptops that are highly portable and blow-you-away powerful thanks to those new 11th generation Tiger Lake chips.
This new line-up, which includes the HP Spectre x360 13-inch, Dell XPS 13-inch, Lenovo Yoga 9i and Acer Swift 5 14-inch, also delivers features that Apple’s MacBooks only dream about – like a 2-in-1 form factor, touchscreen functionality, IR login, or the ability to upgrade to a 4K display. Such things are a boon for work-from-home pros. That 2-in-1 form factor eliminates the need for a separate tablet, saving you money, while a touchscreen or a 4K display should deliver a more seamless creative workflow.
Still, the revered M1 chip has already proven to be a game-changer, giving the MacBook Air a whole lot of power to rival such popular contenders as the Dell XPS 13 and the HP Spectre 13.
Thanks to this chip, what was once a strictly-for-casual-users line is now rocking enough juice to tackle more demanding tasks. And, in that way, the MacBook Air M1 is helping lower the price of entry into prosumer-level ultrabooks.
Now, remote working professionals, office workers and creators have an irresistible option that keeps things portable as well as fiscal-friendly. In a time when the world’s economy is partially paralysed and more people are turning to the comforts of home to put down their professional roots, it’s a crucial one as well. It’s also offering users more compelling reasons to abandon the less seamless Windows ecosystem and switch to Mac. At last, Apple is no longer the priciest proposition. The MacBook Air M1 is proving to be a better value for your money, touting a more powerful performance, better display, longer battery life and superior graphical performance than the similarly priced Dell XPS 13.
SUPER POWERED
With the MacBook Air M1 giving formerly MacBook-Pro-level ultra-portable laptops a good run for their money in terms of power and battery life, things would have to change drastically for such Windows offerings to keep up. But things will change, as they always do. We are, right now, standing at the edge of an ultra-portable laptop revolution.
When you think about all those laptops that came out in the late 1990s and early 2000s, you’d be amazed at how far ultra-portable laptops have come.
The biggest selling point here, of course, is their form factor. Ultra-portable laptops have essentially given portability a whole new meaning, offering a chassis with an area only slightly larger than A4 paper and weighing less than 1.5kg. The MacBook Air M1, for example, is 1.29kg and 1.56cm at its thickest. Meanwhile, its biggest Windows 10 competitor, the Dell XPS 13, is even lighter and thinner at 1.2kg and 1.48cm.
SLIM FIT
You’d be forgiven to think that nothing could possibly be that thin without having to make compromises on power and, in a way, there is some truth to that. Portability is a bit of a double-edged sword. Much like how the most powerful laptops out there are still playing catch up with the most powerful desktop PCs, so are ultrabooks with their bigger (and therefore roomier) counterparts.
There’s a reason why digital nomads have long relied on these. Thanks to Intel’s – as well as Apple’s and, to a degree, AMD’s – efforts in developing thinner yet better performing processors and graphics cards, ultra-portable laptops still deliver enough power to rival most 15-inch and 17-inch laptops.
They might not be able to see you through the most intensive games at 1440p or 4K – as they won’t have enough space under the hood to house a more robust discrete graphics card or prevent thermal throttling, which will affect performance.
However, they should have enough power to see you through demanding tasks like photo editing and design. Apple’s M1 chip has given the MacBook Air M1 exactly that kind of firepower while keeping it fanless, proving once and for all that ultra-portable laptops can be thin, light and powerful.
These devices are reaping the benefits of having less power-hungry internals in other ways as well. Utilising more energy-efficient components, they tend to offer longer battery lives. The Dell XPS 13, for one, offers up to 14 hours while the HP Spectre XPS 13-inch has up to 16 and a half hours. Not to be outdone, the MacBook Air M1 boasts a whopping 18 hours on a single charge. That’s the longest battery life ever on a MacBook Air, and again is thanks to the M1 chip that Apple has declared delivers industryleading power efficiency.
Unfortunately, if you want a thinner and lighter laptop, you’ll have to pay a steep price. Some are more affordable than others. With comparable specs, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon can be a pricier proposition than the Dell XPS 13. A similarly specced Acer Swift can be more affordable still and that’s while offering a touch display, which ultimately adds to its value.
And, with Apple’s most affordable MacBook not just joining the line-up of pro-friendly ultra-portable laptops but also offering a more powerful performance than that of a pricier Dell XPS, that price of entry has also