There's the Asus UX305 or UX303 and the Dell XPS 13, both 2015 versions, both configurable at different price ranges from around $700 or $800, up to around $1700. The former is a bit slicker, the latter is a bit more powerful (although the infinity screen is pretty slick, too).

I can't get over some of the Windows trackpads though, I've happily used Windows desktops for 15 years, the hardware on Windows laptops is alright value, but I still choose Macbooks for the trackpad and increasingly the OS (and the resale value has always been great, too. Selling a 4 year old Macbook for 40% of the price means I look at a $1500 MBP as if it costs me $900, at which point using it for 4 years costs me less than $19 a month. Not something I mind paying). And it seems like MS covered exactly that with a great trackpad for once and attention to the drivers (although I've yet to test it, it looks promising). I hope like Google's Nexus series, it sets some minimum benchmark standards for vendors. iirc I tried the Asus UX305 with my gf a few months ago and the trackpad... just ugh. It's surprising how big of a deal this is to be, usually I'm a pretty compromising person who doesn't fret the small stuff but the feel to the touch, responsiveness etc on the trackpads have become a major stumbling block for me for Windows laptops.

My main computer is a UX305 running Ubuntu, can still dual boot to Windows. Trackpad seems great to me. In fact, I don't like the feel of the trackpads on the Macs I occasionally use. I think a big part of it is what you get used to.

Ah that surprises me!

I had very similar experiences to this reviewer as did my gf.

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3VDcUP60sE

I took her to the store to try some laptops before buying one as she'd been asking me to help with the buying decision. First stop, the UX305, had been reading great things, looked awesome and great specs for money (256gb SSD, 8gb RAM at $700 in a laptop that's thinner, lighter and smaller than a MBA yet has a 13' screen and a full HD (higher resolution than the MBA) screen while looking beautiful with a CPU that can handle most things a typical MBA user does? Talk about MBA killer! I mean hell right now this thing's on Newegg for $680, minus another $100 rebate, that's just ridiculous) so I'd been recommending it to her for days.

But the trackpad and to a lesser extent the keyboard immediately turned her off. I didn't mind the keyboard much but coming from the MBP I really wasn't feeling the trackpad, perhaps it's as you say 'what you get used to', but I'd used Windows laptops for 5-6 years, never really liked the experience and was very much a desktop guy, but the MBP really changed that. I still keep it docked most of the time but I don't dislike this specific trackpad anymore (although I do still prefer a mouse). So the Windows trackpad I was used to I really didn't like, and was fine using the MBP's trackpad once I got it. Anyway despite me urging her to reconsider the UX305 and Dell XPS 13 she eventually chose the MBA in large part over that, which is still a really solid machine if you can look past the ridiculous resolution which to my complete surprise she was unable to notice after I pointed it out to her in the store a couple times.

I've seen several 'fixes' to the UX305's trackpad by the way, like on Windows 10 there's a driver issue you can resolve and you can find how-tos on youtube to do this yourself. Perhaps in the store when we tried out the UX305 they hadn't implemented all the right drivers because I faintly recall thinking of the trackpad issues at the time 'this stuff must be fixable with some drivers'.

I'd like that too. My current device is a Thinkpad Yoga that I love, but I've lost a lot of trust in Lenovo and don't think I would buy from them again. There really isn't anything out there other than a Macbook (running Windows in a VM or reformatted) that I can see myself getting.

I also wish they would release a smaller version of Windows for business use. I want my operating system to simply support the software I run. Cortana, live tiles, and most personalization functions decrease the value of Windows 10 for me. I'd get rid of all the Bing apps (Weather, Finance, Sports, News, Music, etc...) too. If you don't use them, it's just bloatware and I don't understand why they make it difficult to uninstall those applications.

Try checking how much space the Bing apps take up, preferably before you've used any of them....

Windows 10 is actually quite economical in the space it uses. Remember, the full OS runs on 32-bit tablets with only 1GB of RAM and 32GB of storage.

The MacBook means giving up the touch-screen, tablet and high-end pen functionality that you would get with a Surface Pro.

Also, it seems a little inconsistent to worry about the space taken up by Bing apps while contemplating a solution that requires two whole operating systems and a VM ;-)

> Try checking how much space the Bing apps take up

Space is one concern. The other is that these things tend to be taking up cycles in the background. So there is some power consumption and bandwidth use. Plus, none of them are bug-free and so there are security concerns as well (not to mention the privacy issues).

> giving up the touch-screen, tablet and high-end pen functionality that you would get with a Surface Pro

If those functions were useful to me, I would be happy with a Surface Pro or Book. I have a Thinkpad Yoga that can do all that stuff and I've never actually used any of it other than to try it.

> it seems a little inconsistent to worry about the space taken up by Bing apps while contemplating a solution that requires two whole operating systems

The difference is that I have no interest in running any of those applications whereas if I had Mac OS available, there are Mac applications I would run (I'm a big fan of the Omni Group's software). No matter what machine I have, I'll be running Linux in a VM anyway, so that VM overhead is acceptable.

> I have a Thinkpad Yoga that can do all that stuff and > I've never actually used any of it other than to try it.

That surprises me, since I've just had to admit to myself that the ability to manipulate the screen directly is extremely useful.

Thinking like you, I recently bought a new laptop without a touch screen (it was cheaper). A couple of weeks later, I returned it and paid the extra for one with a touch screen.

Re Bing apps, they take up almost no space, use almost no resources, and are completely sandboxed. You might want to look into Windows Runtime, including https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh4649...

I work mostly with text so the most important thing to me is having a good keyboard. I don't like touchscreen laptops because I don't like fingerprints on the screen.

> I recently bought a new laptop

What laptop do you use and how do you like it?

As for the Bing apps, I get it that for what they do, they are efficient. But for me they provide no value and so the fact that they use some space, CPU, bandwidth, have bugs, and have privacy issues means that I would like to be able to uninstall them and not think about them. I don't understand why they aren't at least easily uninstalled. It makes me wonder if the data they send back to Microsoft is valuable even when they aren't actively used.

Currently on a Lenovo Yoga, being the cheapest range with a decent keyboard. However, it's a holdover machine. The longer term plan is to buy something designed for Windows 10, probably next year. (Windows 10 isn't finished and the hardware isn't here yet.) So, at this stage, I don't know.

Re Bing apps, they were created to get some stylish-looking apps into the Windows Store, to get Windows 8 users used to apps, and to provide examples to third-party developers. I expect them to be installed on demand, and a couple of them are already scheduled to be discontinued. They're really not worth obsessing over.

It looks to me like all you have to do to uninstall them is go to System -> Apps and Features, select the app, and click uninstall.

Am I missing something? I tried it on a few and it seems to work fine.

When I tried to do that, a bunch of them had no uninstall option and I had to do a PowerShell command to get rid of them.

I followed the instructions on this page: http://www.howtogeek.com/224798/how-to-uninstall-windows-10s...

Uninstalling Cortana is even trickier so I haven't done anything with it yet, but it's probably the feature I would most like to get rid of.

Microsoft said: "You can turn off Input Personalization at any time. This will stop the data collection for this feature and will delete associated data stored on your device, such as your local user dictionary and your input history. As Cortana uses this data to help understand your input, turning off Input Personalization will also disable Cortana on your device. At https://www.bing.com/account/personalization, you can also clear data sent to Microsoft, such as your contacts and calendar data, user dictionary, as well as search and browsing history if your device also had Cortana enabled."

Cortana is just a cute name for part of the indexed search feature, which is controlled by Group Policies:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt577208%28v=vs....

Cortana is not turned on by default, and if she's not been turned on, there is no real benefit to removing "her".

However, for the record, I think Cortana is great....

Since Windows 10 is "Windows as a service", patched and maintained remotely, I'd expect random screwing around to be repaired remotely. However, it would be interesting to know if this will affect Windows' stability or performance. However, in general, it's probably a bad idea to mess around with the workings of things you don't understand.

This is one of the reasons I don't mess around with Android, or try to remove all the Google apps I don't want, or remove Google Now ;-)

Thank you for all the information.

I don't have a Microsoft account, so the account personalization link doesn't work. Unfortunately, my machine is still constantly contacting Microsoft. It's a problem because I'm often tethering my computer to my phone and I have pretty limited bandwidth caps.

Ah. Have you set Windows 10 to not download from a metered account?

The main point of Windows 10 is that it's a mobile operating system with cloud integration. (Remember, the same OS runs on smartphones. Cortana, apps, and Live Tiles came from Windows Phone.)

The Microsoft account gives you access to 15GB of free space on OneDrive, and the online Office apps (including OneNote and some new ones). The idea is to use the same apps on iOS and Android smartphones and tablets so you get the benefits of a cross-platform ecosystem.

It's also maintained and updated on a continuous basis -- remember it's "Windows as a Service". If you read all of this page (1), it will give you a good idea of the telemetry involved.

If you had Windows 10 Pro laptop joined to a company domain you would get a lot of control, but if you're operating as a consumer/amateur then you're fighting the whole design of the system, and that's probably a losing battle. It's like a vegan complaining about a steak-house menu.

Try running ShutUp10 from http://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

Have you thought of switching to Linux Mint? ;-)

(1) https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt577208%28v=vs....

That will work if you're tethering via WiFi, but Windows won't let you set an "Ethernet" (RNDIS) connection as metered, presumably because no Microsoft engineer has encountered such thing as a bandwidth cap.

Ah, many thanks for the info!

In PowerShell, you can run

  Get-AppxPackage *bing* | Remove-AppxPackage

to get rid of those Bing apps.

Funny as it may sound, the Razer Blade might fit that bill for you, depending on what you mean by 'ultrabook'.

It's a 14" Retina-like notebook, great trackpad with click buttons, extremely powerful internals, all-metal chassis, and only slightly bigger than a Macbook. They sell them at the MS store and if you buy from there they come with plain-vanilla Windows installed, without crapware. They also run Ubuntu extremely well.

There are downsides: it's very expensive, you're buying from a less-well-known supplier, parts are proprietary so home repair is out of the question, and you have to be OK with the black chassis and 90's-hacker-green keyboard.

But the system itself is outstanding. Don't know why it's not recommended more often, especially considering it's very Linux-friendly.

How's the battery life and thermal management? Those would be my two main concerns with a gaming-oriented laptop. I do agree that it looks quite slick.

It gets very hot during gaming, but for day to day use the temperature is just fine. Battery life is good. I dual boot and use Ubuntu 98% of the time, and on 15.04 it gets 4-5 hours I think.

The $700 Asus Zenbook is probably the closest we'll get to that. MS isn't going to become a company that attacks its OEM's product lines on the regular. The Surface line is pretty unique and doesn't overlap OEM products, at least for the most part. There are some oddball Lenovos and ASUS's kinda sorta close to a Surface, but they weren't selling.

The thing is, MSFT really does need to attack the OEMs-get them to up their game, and (naively, perhaps?) to drastically reduce the number of products they offer.

MS tried controlling OEMs in the 90s and was shot down by the DOJ. I'm not sure if you want a strong MS again, even though its obvious now that the ruling was over-reaching.

Its only now that a lot of those provisions have expired that it can start being slightly tougher with OEMs - making its own products, making its own anti-virus, selling non-crapified computers in its own stores, etc. MS's hands will always be tied from this questionable ruling and the threat of another similar ruling in the future. The rise of mobile is probably also helping as MS can easier claim its not the sole monopoly in computing.

I agree. A couple of the problems it would address is hardware quality and what consumers should expect from a new windows machine. Microsoft can establish a good baseline or a high end halo product like what they've done with their expanded surface line.

I agree, too. Unfortunately, high quality construction costs money, and most people buy on price. That's why those crappy vendors have more than 90% of the market.

Asus is trying a couple of machined-aluminium Windows Transformer Books with Chi branding. They are very well made. Heard of them? Think they're outselling plastic $199 HP Streams?

That would be the HP Spectre X360:

http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/HP-Spect...

I really enjoyed my Acer Aspire S7 touchscreen, one-piece ultrabook. Really a fantastic, lightweight, great looking computer. I ended up selling it for a SP3, which I prefer. But after doing lots of research and testing out various ultrabooks, I liked the S7 the best.

http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/series/aspires7

I don't see a one piece in their future, but I believe this does run vanilla Windows 10. And even they believe you'll run this as a one piece 80% of the time.

All they have to do is pickup an X201, slap a decent panel and modern Intel chip in it, an they're essentially done.

Surface Book looks like they're trying too hard to copy Macbook, down to the crappy keyboard and no-button trackpad. No trackpoint, either. I wonder if it burns hot like a Macbook, too?