True, but my new Surface Pro i5 purchased for $699 is nonetheless a hell of a deal.

A 3$ unit cost in purchasing balloons to huge multiples of that in the production environment to a final product. My threshold is not functional vs non-functional. You see cars in the developing world with hundreds of thousands of miles, and they're still puttering around on the road. Functional, but not too enjoyable to operate :)

SurfaceBook is the way to go. No question

I'd have recommended the Stealth myself if it weren't for the price. I went with a Razer Blade which is a bit heavier and quite a bit more expensive, but it is a gorgeous machine and aside from the gaming it has meant no more waiting for Excel to recalculate cells when I've done some lazy coding.

Given the price I'd have thought the best choice would be the Dell XPS 13, with the Lenovo X-series behind (either Carbon or the 2xx series).

i7-3317u has a passmark of about 3000. Anything with an i5 will be quite a bit quicker, but the i3-7100u is only a hair quicker (3700, and in many ways this is more of a log2 scale -- to really feel "quicker" you want the benchmarked # to roughly double), but there are plenty of really low end machines that are well under 3000 -- I'd avoid anything Atom, Celeron, or Pentium although a few of the higher-end ones of those will at least approximate the current speed.

Also, make sure you get 8GB of memory and some kind of SSD.

The Lenovo X1 is a great machine, but at 14" it may be a bit heavier, and it will certainly have a bigger footprint. The 12.5" Lenovo X2x0 or Dell Latitude E72x0 are both the best 12.5" business machines and they will be more durable than the ultrabook-style super thin machines, although they'll be a bit thicker and bulkier. (I would recommend staying away from the Dell E52x0 series; the 5000-series quality has never been good, and unfortunately the 6000-series has gone.)

If you want a convertible machine, the Surface Pro is one of the best, although a reasonably powerful configuration will be quite a bit pricier than your budget. The Surface Notebook is quite a bit less interesting.

The XPS 13 is one of the best ultrabook-style machines out there, and manages to get a 13" screen into a 12" chassis. It's got an almost-macbook like lack of ports, but otherwise it's a superb machine. An i5 configuration new may be a bit beyond your budget, but the i3 model that will be in budget is probably OK.

In general, I follow higher-power machines rather than the smallest ultrabooks, so current Samsung/Asus/etc ultra-thin models are a bit obscure to me, but both those brands have a good reputation.

Any thoughts on the Lenovo X1 carbon 6th generation laptops? I'm looking for a primary laptop that's going to see a lot of car and plane travel. When I configured it on the main Lenovo website it cost somewhere between $1700 (current discount) to $2400 (llist). That's getting into the upper range of what I was looking to spend. I also looked at a Surface Book 2 but when I configured it with the top specs it priced out at nearly $3000 with only a $300 discount.

6 months later , we actually bought:

MS Surface pro convertible - so far, very very positive impression and satisfaction.

Huawei matebook x pro ultrabooo - i was tempted by the daring attempt by huawei. Lives up to hype in some ways. Falls on it's face in others (I stand by what I said in other posts).

Over this last week some very nice - on paper! - products were announced or previewed by dell, Lenovo, Asus, etc. Particularly the new Lenovos are intriguing

I had an earlier X1 Carbon (not sure which gen but 3.5yrs old now) and have just bought a 6th generation X1 Carbon. I was open to alternatives but my research indicated it was still the ultrabook to beat. On the Lenovo site it came up to 1850usd or so incl taxes (top level i7 vPro, 16GB ram, 512gb sad, wqhd screen with IR camera and win pro, silver body) but they wanted a month to build and ship it. As I was only in the US for 2 weeks and hadn't timed the order right it wasn't gonna work so I cancelled as I found the exact same spec (but black instead of silver) on Amazon for 100usd less (incl taxes). Have had it for 3 weeks now and am loving it.