The ultraportable laptop: form vs. function

In the world of ultraportable laptops, there's no more fundamental dichotomy than that of form vs. function. After all, a good subnotebook is only expected to be two things at the end of the day: portable and usable enough to get the job done. The question is, however, how much portability are you willing to sacrifice for power? Or conversely, how many features are you willing to go without for the sake of a featherweight machine?

Two new ultraportable laptops--the Apple MacBook Air and the Lenovo ThinkPad X300--rekindled that age old ultraportable debate this past week. Both laptops can fit in a manila mailing envelope. Both sport dual-core Intel chips and can run Windows. Both offer WiFi, Bluetooth, a full-size keyboard, a 13.3" LED-backlit display and a respectable amount of battery life. And both machines are being drooled over by mobile professionals as we speak.

Here's where they diverge: the X300 is a bit fatter but offers a whole lot more in the built-in hardware department (optical drive, 3G, more ports). Meanwhile, the MacBook Air sacrifices a lot of features in order to squeeze into a jaw-droppingly svelte case. In this light, many have pointed to the X300 as the business answer to the more consumer-oriented MacBook Air.

I, however, am not buying this argument. I think that there are a lot of consumers out there who will find the X300 appealing. And I think there are just as many road warriors who would love to tuck a MacBook Air into their briefcase and forget that it's there. Ultimately, it comes down to a question of how you work and what you value in a portable machine. Do you need multiple USB ports and an Ethernet jack or are you wireless 99 percent of the time? Do you like to watch DVDs while waiting at the airport on business trips? Would that extra inch of thickness be just enough to make your bag feel too cramped? Does the idea of a major data transfer over WiFi fill you with dread?

At the end of the day, the MacBook Air and the ThinkPad X300 are both powerful machines in impressively small packages. And it can be said that both offer a lot of function with a focus on form. The real question, as with any laptop, is which offers the right balance for the way that you work? I don't think I need to tell you that there's only one person who knows the answer to that question. -Mehan