Looking for a College Programmer's Laptop

bennyty · August 2, 2014

Hey, I'm attending an engineering school as a CS student and I'm looking for a new 12-15" hopefully Haswell laptop. I have a $2000 dollar budget.

It needs to have:

an excellent keyboard and trackpad for all the programming and inevitable essays I must write
a battery life long enough to get through all my classes without my worrying too much (7 hours?) I wouldn't mind carrying a spare battery.

I'd love if it was:

as light as possible as I'm probably going to be carrying it all day every day.
Nice looking - if it ends up looking like a Lenovo Thinkpad T440s I'll deal but, I'd prefer something looking like a Samsung Ativ Book 9 / MBA / Zenbook
an active digitizer.
a convertible in the form of the Lenovo Yoga 2 as I'm going to try to use the active digitizer to take written notes in class.

The only laptop I've ever seen that comes close to what I'm currently looking for is a Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga (thinkpad version, not ideapad or yoga 2). However, I've read that it's plagued screen problems (ghosting and image burn) not to mention that it's heavier, thicker, and not as pretty as most. The hardware problems are as of 6 months ago, does anyone know if they have been fixed?

As of now I'm trying to choose between:

Thinkpad T440s - By all accounts, very solid but I'd like something sexier and (hopefully) with a digitizer.
Thinkpad Yoga - A slightly downgraded version of the T440s but has a digitizer. (and the previously mentioned screen issues)
Thinkpad X1 Carbon - Kind of a compromise between the above and below, still a thinkpad but a nicer design and worse keyboard.
Asus Zenbook UX302LN or Samsung Ativ Book 9 - Probably the best consumer oriented ultrabooks, however they don't seem to have a keyboard that supports all the hours of typing I know that I'm going to end up doing.
Surface Pro 3 - So perfect. Except no actual keyboard... so

Thank you all for you're suggestions and time.

P.S. If anyone has suggestions regarding electronic handwritten notes in college, I'm all ears. I'm planning on using OneNote.

rashdanml · August 2, 2014

All of the keyboards on the Thinkpads are identical and excellent - even the new modified layout since 2 generations ago.

The only Thinkpad with a digitizer currently would be the Yoga. The only other option is buying an X230 Tablet from an alternate source, but I wouldn't go for it: the hinge design on the Yoga is much better than the X230T.

IIRC, the Yoga is thinner than the T440s. As for the ghosting issues, Lenovo apparently has a replacement panel for laptops that do exhibit that behaviour.

If the digitizer is a must-have, the Yoga is your only option of the listed ones.

edit: I'm a minimalist. My suggestion is: http://www.styluslabs.com/ files saved as .html and can be exported to PDF. Afaik, doesn't support annotating PDFs yet, but it's a planned feature.