Which work laptop to get

[z0mb13]

Hi guys, i need a new work laptop for work with the following characteristics:
light and portable (ultrabook weight), has to have solid build quality and excellent keyboard and trackpad, good performance (i5 or above), can be either windows or mac os, large screen size and higher resolution (13 inch or above)

I believe i narrowed it down to the following laptops:
- macbook air 13 inch, will get the 8gb ram version for future proofing. Pros: lightweight, excellent built quality (keyboard and trackpad). Cons: mac osx based (i do a lot of heavy excel modelling and powerpoint, and i think office for mac is inferior to office for windows, but i can use parallels or dual boot)

- retina macbook pro 13 inch. Pros: retina display, but lower screen usable resolution. Cons: i read reviews of it being underpowered, ie choppiness when scrolling so im kind of wary of buying it at this time (maybe wait for haswell?) but then again the recent price drop to 1500 usd really intrigues me.

- thinkpad x1 carbon (touch and non touch version). Pros: excellent thinkpad build quality, windows based, large screen resolution. Cons: the touch version is expensive (around 1600 for the configuration that i want: 8gb ram minimum). Maybe i should just get the non touch version? I almost ordered the touch one couple of days ago, but held back after they removed the instant savings (really pissed me off)

Any other laptops that i should consider?

Thanks for the inputt guys!!

 

[crab0]

The rMBP is super nice piece of kit and has a smaller footprint then the Air (kinda like XPS 13 is) and makes the screens of the other two you listed look awful. I know you can get webkit nightly to fix the scrolling though I didn't notice it when scrolling a heavy website like The Verge (didn't test Facebook as wasnt going to sign in on public computer).

You could look into the UX31 and UX32 Zenbooks, both 13.3 inches and 1080p IPS screens with former 3 lbs and 128/256 SSD options but capped at 4GB ram and the later is 3.2 lbs has 620M gpu, ram up to 10GB ram (2 soldered, up 8 expandable) but no SSD option (I believe you can install your own).

 

[z0mb13]

I will check out the 13 rmbp. Thx for the other recs, but the other brands are really hard to find here, and i worry a bit with the resale value (thinkpad and apple hold their values realy well)

 

[z0mb13]

Ok i fell in love with the 13 retina macbook pro and just ordered one

 

[Rasterman]

Yeah resale is huge on macs, I'm getting ready to sell my 2008 macbook and its still at 40% of what I paid for it!