Ultrabooks

Considering replacing my Macbook Pro with an ultrabook of some description. This is mainly due to the fact I need to use Visual Studio so much now, and it doesn't work too well in a Virtual Machine.

Any recommendations? My budget would be around £1,000, maybe a little higher if it was a really good machine.

I need loadsa RAM (16GB, or expansion slots to allow me to put in 16GB easily), a high res screen, around 13" and lightweight with good battery life (at least 6 hours).

It sounds like you want powerful, small and light with long battery. I think some of those will need to give.

Battery life is usually inverse proportion to power. Also, the more powerful devices tend to be larger (because of fitting the cooling into the case). Even just to get 4x4GB memory sticks in probably means the average 13" case is too small.

The Sony ultrabooks will potentially give you 8GB in that form factor (the Vaio Pro 13).

Dell do an Alienware with 14" screen and 16GB but it is about £1700. Alternative is the XPS 13 but again only 8GB RAM.

So, what of your requirements can give. Can you give up on the ultrabook and go for a full size (15" or 17" laptop) in which case you will likely get more bang for your buck. If you do that then battery life will likely be shorter. Or can you give up on some power and drop down to 8GB (processor will also generally need to be lower spec to have any chance of getting that sort of battery life).

Do you actually NEED it to be a laptop?

As it has already been stated that there will be some massive power requirements and I haven't seen a laptop with anything over 8GB of memory.

Also the Six hour battery life is a bit steep, even with a SSD drive and 12 cell battery you could possibly only get 4 hours tops when running.

I would say for that budget get a self build PC (or get somebody to build it for you) or see if there is a local company that can do custom laptop builds.

We have one round here that has started but I would think that even they would stuggle for what your asking, laptops are for portability not really for raw grunt, not even the ultrabooks.

Laptops do exist with 16GB (I have had mine for over a year).

But, they tend to be 17" screens, large laptops with high power procs (quad core i7) and beefy graphics cards. All that added together is large, noisy and power hungry.

Ultrabooks are not designed for this sort of higher end use.

Hmm?

My 2011 macbook pro has 16GB of RAM (2x8GB SODIMMs). Cost about £80 for the RAM.

I think I'm just going to wait for the Haswell retina MBP refresh and see if it offers 16GB. I already have a really powerful desktop PC.