Originally Posted by
stimpy
Thanks for the review. I have the same background as you with many years of Thinkpads, the last year and a half with an X61s. But there were just too many negatives to this 1st generation Air that I decided to wait. I got the X300 and I am very happy. It is a heck of a lot better than the X61s and it's not just the screen.
One thing about the battery, you say you were only getting 2 hours on your X61s with the small battery. I was getting over 4 hours for the first year and down to 3 hours after 18 months. Maybe you just had a bad battery?
It's not loss of features that is keeping me from the Air, but lack of quality in the 1st generation product, ie the problem you had with your first unit. I too don't care about optical drives, however I make heavy use out of USB peripherals so when the 2nd gen Air comes out and fixes that and all the other issues I may make the switch. For now I am quite happy with the X300 and would recommend it to any frequent traveler.
No way on the battery. I have several slims and several 8 cells. I do NOT turn the brighness down on my laptops. I get 2 hours on the slims on both the x60s and x61s.
Yes, I know that the x300 upgrade is a lot more than just the screen. I'm talking about all of the other differences between my Thinkpad and the Air -- the even higher build quality, the keyboard, and just the extreme thin size on the edges. I think the x300 will be very similar to the x61s in those aspect. One thing that the x300 did add was a built in webcam, but I doubt that it wil work in OS X w/ iChat. The only reason I kept tte x60s was because it worked so well with OS X, but the x61s didn't.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the x300 is a kick ... machine. Look at my Thinkpad past.
I don't think much of the problem I had with the MBA. My first x61s has major stability problems out of the box and had to be returned. My current x61s is not nearly as stable as my x60s is. Sometimes you get a lemon laptop. The MBA just gets so much coverage and people are looking for ANY reason to bash it. It's ridiculous. Look on Facebook and see how many groups there are about how MBAs are stupid. Are there any for the x300? I don't see any problems with the MBA other than the 80gb, and like I said, it turned out not to be an issue. What USB issues do you have? What do you need to plug in there? The only thing I ever plug in is my USB gsm or evdo modem. I don't see that as a negative either. I had to add on a EVDO modem to my Thinkpads. There wasn't an internal option for Sprint, and adding your own miniPCI card does not work.