MacBooks Ace Laptop Survey Ratings – Again

LAPTOP Mag has posted results of its Best And Worst Notebook Brands Survey for 2013, with Apple king of the hill for the fourth year in a row, taking top honors in five of eight evaluation categories, including reviews, design, keyboards and touchpads, display and audio, and software, as well as taking second place in the tech support category – trailing only in not having an entry in the low-cost laptop space. LAPTOP’s editors think Apple could use a notebook under $800 given that the average laptop price is around $500 and even cheaper Chromebooks are taking off, but affirm that Apple laptops continue to epitomize the best of the best.

They note that Apple simply offers the best keyboard and trackpad experience around, even beating out perennial favorite of Lenovo this year. Apple’s 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pros feature the highest resolution displays available in a notebook, with 226 and 217 PPI, respectively, and unlike Windows machines that have full HD resolutions, Apple didn’t make desktop icons so small you need a magnifying glass to discern them.

Lenovo finished in second-place finish for the third year running, taking the top spot for value and selection as well as innovation.

Rounding out the top three ASUS leap-frogged from last years fifth-place finish to third, having made major strides in keyboards and touchpads this year while sharing the top spot in innovation with Lenovo.

For the full reports visit here:
http://goo.gl/J9L1l
and here:
http://goo.gl/r9shW

Retina MacBook Number One In PCMag’s 2013 Top 10 Best Laptops Ratings

http://goo.gl/0xtPp PCMag’s Laarni Almendrala Ragaza says that with the advent of Windows 8, figuring out what laptop to buy is more complex than ever, so the editors hive winnowed down your options to the 10 best laptops available today.

Ragaza suggests that if you’re on a limited budget, you’ll want to consider anything under $500 that offers at least a Core i3 CPU and 4GB of memory, but if you can afford it, Apple’s new 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro takes top spot.

PCMag editor Joel Santo Domingo says if you absolutely must have a display with greater-than-HD resolution and you need to take that show on the road, you want Apple’s MacBook Pro with Retina display, which while it’s is thinner than the old-school 13-inch MacBook Pro, still feels sturdy in your hand. He notes that the new MacBook Pro uses flash storage instead of a spinning hard drive so the system boots up and launches apps much more quickly, enables Apple’s Power Nap feature that updates social media, email, contacts, and location tracking over Wi-Fi even while the laptop is asleep, and the review model’s 256GB of flash storage is quite usable even for users who need to run Windows through Boot Camp or other virtual environments like Parallels Desktop. You can forgo half the storage (128GB) to save $300, or up the total to 512GB (for $500) or 768GB (for $1,000). You can also use the built-in SDXC card slot for extra storage.

The Top Ten Laptops For 2013 are:
• Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch (Retina Display)
• Asus VivoBook S400CA-UH51
• Asus Zenbook Prime Touch UX31A-BHI5T
• Dell Latitude 10
• Dell Latitude 6430u
• Dell XPS 10
• Lenovo ThinkPad X230t
• Microsoft Surface Windows 8 Pro
• Origin EON17-SLX
• Toshiba Portege R935-P322

For the full reports visit here:
http://goo.gl/0xtPp
and here
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2411425,00.asp