You’d have to be pretty DAFT to watch a hi-def movie on an 11″ screen. The HP HDX16 offers a far superior Blu-ray viewing experience and costs only half the price…

Not sure why US$4400 is considered so steep. If it really is the best in its class (which I assume is what you’d be aiming for in a high priced laptop) then it should get a price premium for that. Here in NZ, if I wanted to buy a Panasonic Y7 then that would cost me pretty much the same price. Why would I want a Y7? It’s only 3.3lbs but comes with a 14″ SXGA+ screen which seems to be unique. A Motion Computing LE1700 tablet bought in the US kitted out properly to run Vista (eg 4GB RAM) would hit that mark pretty fast with a few accessories. In NZ, buying a top of the line MacBook Pro would get pretty close to that price too. My desktop cost almost that amount… all because I wanted it to be really usable, to help me not hinder me. Throw in a decent graphics card to run dual WSXGA+ screens, 4GB RAM for Vista, 4 harddrives for RAID 0+1 and a Quad-core Intel processor and you’re talking decent money. It’s easy to buy a cheap crappy notebook that is generically fine but really if you’re planning on doing some real work with your hardware it should help you achieve your work, not slow you down. Frankly, when it comes to my time (even as a semi-student) a couple of grand extra on hardware is nothing. What pisses me off is that I have to live with an okay, so so, reasonable OS but if I want to change to OSX which I feel is probably better for me then my current system in Apple hardware would set me back US$7000!!!

What… USD4400 is not that much. I mean, this laptop clearly is a better deal than getting a 500 MSI wind, plus a 1300 Macbook, plus a 1800 24 inch iMac, plus some crazy speed demon for your gaming needs at 800.

Of course this laptop is a better deal: it says “sony” right there, look!