Welcome to a laptop battery specialist of the Apple Laptop Battery
Windows 8 is more than just the most radical makeover in the quarter-century history of Microsoft's operating system. It's also creating a new class of mutant personal computers.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the laptop segment, where the long-dominant clamshell design is yielding to new forms: computers that bend, tilt and swivel, with touch screens that are clearly inspired by, even if they don't directly compete with, handheld tablets like Apple's iPad.
With that in mind, I've been trying several of these new convertible-tablet hybrids with battery like Apple M7385 Battery, Apple M6392 Battery, Apple M7621 Battery, Apple iBook M2453 Battery, Apple A1045 Battery, Apple A1106 Battery, Apple M9422 Battery, Apple M9623 Battery, Apple M8956 Battery, Apple M7621 Battery, Apple M8665 Battery, Apple M9628 Battery. All are of the "Ultrabook" category: They run on Intel chips, are thin and light as these things go, have no DVD drives and use solid-state flash memory in place of a traditional hard disk.
Of the first wave, my favorite so far is Lenovo's IdeaPad Yoga, which as its name implies can be folded into all sorts of interesting positions.
At first glance, the Yoga, which starts at $999, looks like a fairly standard clamshell, .67 inch thick and weighing 3.4 pounds. It's solidly built, with hinges strong enough to keep the 13.3-inch screen from flopping around -- one of my laptop pet peeves.
If you use the screen only in that position, though, you're missing the whole point.
Fold the Yoga over and it becomes a touchscreen tablet -- too heavy to hold for long, but useful to watch a video or take advantage of Windows 8's full-screen applications. (The keyboard, which faces out, is automatically disabled to avoid errant presses.) You can also stand the screen up, using the inverted keyboard as a base, or prop it up like a tent.
The major drawback, one that afflicts its competitors as well, is the minimal storage capacity -- or, more specifically, the amount of it claimed by Windows 8 system files. Fewer than half the 128 gigabytes on my test machine were available for my own applications, files and content. The least expensive model with a more plausible 256 GB, available in the U.S. only through Best Buy, is $1,400.