Lenovo's X300 vs. Apple's MacBook Air

[aihyah]

BTW, to aihyah, what a good idea! How about you boycott all Chinese products and stop using anything you have that is made in China. That way you can stave them back to the stone age and we don't to have act like we care about their human-rights. After all, most of us don't take notice of the millions of African people dying from starvation and war crimes(please look at Congo for example).

sometimes something is better than nothing. by your reasoning we might as well not care about anything.

 

[themonk]

To start, I own an X300 and my partner owns a MBA. The first thing you notice about the MBA is how thin it is but after you study it for awhile this actually an optical illusion. The way apple tappers the edges of the air allows for this illusion which is cool but is one of the reason for the lack of pots because there is no outside room in the case for other ports.

Looks:
The MBA is a great laptop for the living room. It has great style and you wife won?t be upset with a laptop lying around.

The x300 is nothing like that. It does have an inherent beauty about it in its simplicity but you won?t get chicks with it. And I have notice that a lot of people don?t even notice unless they pick up the x300 that it is different from any other ThinkPad.

Speed:
My business partner has the MBA with standard HDD so it is not a fair match. The x300 is much snappier. Applications seem to open instantly in the x300 but the MBA is no slouch. I have seen the MBA slack on some simple applications or even in office 2008 trying to open attachments even with Excel open. I would assume the bottle neck is the HDD.

Day in the life of a consultant:
If you are going to use this as a work laptop I have some observations. The MBA has attachments for everything except Wi-Fi. We were at a client that had spotty Wi-Fi and my partner had to drive to apple store to get the Ethernet dongle (also takes up the only usb port). He also has to carry a dongle for presentations. There has also been three occasions that a client gave him a CD and I had to copy it over to the server for him to access. None of these apply with the x300 ? it?s an all inclusive package including WWAN which I think is the main downfall of the air. Why apple didn?t include a WWAN card is mind boggling. I can see the logic in ditching the Ethernet port but then you have to give the MBA something to work with.

The x300 is (IMHO) hands down the best full featured laptop for a consultant that works off site quite a bit. If you want looks and a bit of flash then you should go with the MBA ? women love this thing. He constantly gets comments in meetings from the ladies. On the other hand if you need to work anywhere and have the tools to get the job done then the x300 is you machine.