Best Ultrabooks — The Two Best Options (Windows vs Mac)
In terms of ultra-books, I mention two best options; one ultra-book with Windows, and one with MacOS. This way you can choose depending on your operating system preference.
Best Windows ultrabook — Dell XPS 13 9380 BNX38005
The Dell XPS 13 9380 BNX38005 is a very powerful and compact ultrabook. The 9380 series is the new version of the Dell XPS 13 of the year 2019.
This laptop is my choice for Best Windows Ultrabook because of the powerful hardware, the good (multi-touch) screen, the long battery life, and the good portability.
The laptop is equipped with an Intel Core i7–8565U CPU (1.8–4.8 GHz), Intel UHD Graphics 620 video chip, 16 GB RAM, and a 1TB PCIe SSD.
The PCIe SSD is faster than standard (SATA) SSDs, and ensures that the laptop starts up very quickly and files will load faster.
With these specifications, this laptop is suitable for every conceivable business use. For example, this laptop can handle heavy photo and video editing software.
Its powerful hardware that will also save you time with long-term and demanding tasks such as rendering and compiling.
The screen of this laptop is 13.3 inches in diagonal, and has a 4K resolution : 3840 × 2160. On the 13.3 inch screen, this ensures a very high pixel density. Due to the high pixel density, the screen is so sharp that it is impossible to see pixels at a normal distance. This is pleasant for the eyes, especially with long-term, concentrated work.
This laptop is lightweight and compact, and therefore easy to carry. The laptop is 30.2 cm wide, 19.9 cm deep, and 1.16 cm thick. The weight is only 1.23 kg. A change compared to the 2018 model is that the webcam is above the screen again instead of below. Yet the border around the screen is still fairly thin. Furthermore, the XPS 13 9380 has almost the same construction as last year’s model.
This laptop receives a lot of positive reviews. For example, Engadget.com calls this laptop the ‘perfect ultraportable’, and this laptop gets a score of 88/100 on the laptop review site techradar.com.
The laptopmag.com rates this laptop with a 8/10, and calls the laptop “nearly perfect.” This gives this new version a higher score than last year’s Dell XPS 13.
You can buy the Dell XPS 13 9380 BNX398005 online. The price is US$1,129.99 at the time of writing. Hereby you get a 3 year on-site factory warranty. In the event of a problem with your laptop, a Dell repairer will come by to repair your laptop.
Best Apple laptop — MacBook Pro 15 inch with touchbar (MR942N / A )
The MR942N / A is the powerful configuration of a 15-inch MacBook Pro from 2018. This configuration contains the Intel Core i7–8850H , a hexa-core processor (six processor cores) with a clock speed of 2.6 to max 4.3 GHz.
In addition, this MacBook Pro laptop contains 16 GM RAM, and the AMD Radeon Pro 560X; a dedicated graphic chip with 4 GB video memory.
This laptop can handle any conceivable productive work, and is very suitable for photo and video editing. This laptop has 512 GB of SSD storage space for file storage.
his MacBook Pro is also equipped with the so-called ‘Touch Bar’, which can further facilitate work.
The Touch Bar is a thin, elongated strip of touchscreen above the keyboard. Here, various additional keys or sliders can be dynamically displayed.
Certain software, including Adobe Photoshop, has built-in extra functionality for the Touch Bar. In Photoshop you can select colors with the Touch Bar, or scroll through the editing history.
Since the MacBook pro has a strong focus on photo and video editing, the 15-inch version is a better choice than the 13-inch version of the MacBook Pro: a larger screen simply works better when editing photos and video. The 15 inch screen of this laptop has a resolution of 2880 × 1800 pixels.
You can read an extensive review and test of this laptop on Laptopmag.com . The test shows, among other things, that the laptop has a battery life of 10:21 hours for web browsing over Wi-Fi. This laptop also receives the ‘Editor’s choice’ award.
The 15-inch MacBook Pro with touchbar can be ordered online. The price was $2,399 at the time of writing. You can also buy refurbished devices from tech.trade. They offer good selection of MacBooks in working condition. The MacBooks are on sale starting from just £399.00. These laptops are now much cheaper than the original price.
