So, I was looking at my battery degradation on my stealth a while back and noticed that the battery wear level is about 15% on HWMonitor, which is still bearable. That got me thinking of a replacement though, since there are a myriad of minor issues that I have with the 7th gen Blade Stealth. I have a decent rig at home with a 1700X and dual 1440p monitors. What I need is an ultrabook that is similar to the Stealth 2017, but with a bigger battery, and preferably a Coffee lake CPU. Does anyone have suggestions or specific models that would fit my use case?
My main mobile workload consists of 80% of the time on Teamviewer when I'm in class or at work, with the other 20% generally on OneNote/Chrome/FL Studio/Ableton. I'd like to have ideally a 13-15 inch display.
My price point is anything under $1300 Canadian rupees (can be stretched if there's a very good value near it)
A few dealbreakers are:
- Non-touch display
- <1080p display
- Heavier than 1.7kg
- Average or below average battery life
- <8GB RAM (unless expandable/upgradeable)
- Any 2C/4T CPU or less
Almost dealbreaking:
- No backlit keyboard
- Non-aluminum chassis
- Lack of Thunderbolt support
- No Windows Precision trackpad
Nice-to-have:
- Pen support
- 1440p display (doesn't have to be touch in that case)
- Comfortable keyboard
Ideally, I'd like to have an i5-8520U with expandable ram slots, glossy 1080p touch display, >50Wh battery, backlit keyboard.
For the price, it's not unreasonable. I don't need SSD support (I have extra 2.5in and NVMe SSDs lying around to upgrade with) and don't care about RAM if it's user-upgradeable. Hopefully there are some dollars that can be saved through those two options.
Any suggestions will be welcome :)
Cheers!