TOP 5 ultrabooks with good autonomy and price tag up to $1000

Launched in early 2022, the Pavilion Aero 13 Ultrabook is HP's lightest consumer ultrabook and one of the lightest laptops on the market. The weight of a laptop with a 13.3-inch screen is 987 grams, and this is with a thickness of 17 mm. The body was made deliberately angular, the frames around the display are as thin as possible, and the keyboard with rather large keys almost crawls out of the body. As is customary with HP, the lid is designed minimalistically and there is nothing on it except the company logo. The case itself is made mainly of lightweight and durable magnesium alloy with small inclusions of plastic and aluminium.

No less important is what this baby is capable of in business. And here it is in order, to say the least: it is equipped with a fairly powerful 12-thread AMD Ryzen 5 5600U processor, 16 GB of RAM, and a compact 512 GB M.2 SSD plays the role of storage. It must be said right away that, taking into account the tiny mass and democratic cost, this configuration is pleasantly surprising, initially we expected to see some kind of old 10th generation Core i5 and 8 GB of RAM. While this is not a full-fledged workstation, it is also not a simple typewriter for work and entertainment on the go.

We turn to the display, and here again the surprise. The manufacturer did not save money and installed a high-quality IPS-matrix with a resolution of 1920x1200 pixels, full coverage of the sRGB color spectrum and a brightness margin of 400 cd/m². That is, you can tinker with this in the sun, and, for example, do layout. Adjusted for the cost of $750, we were mentally prepared for the most ordinary dull matrix, but HP managed to pleasantly surprise. The built-in battery is capable of holding a charge for about 10 hours, but for this you will have to reduce the screen brightness by half and set the economy mode. Fast charging works via USB C and restores half the charge in 30 minutes. Also on board there is a card reader, a fingerprint scanner, a Wi-Fi 6 module and not particularly loud, but well-balanced speakers from Bang & Olufsen. Against this background, only a bulky power supply and not quite the usual size of the keyboard upset me. Although, the keys themselves are downright excellent - they work very clearly and click pleasantly.

The Lenovo ThinkBook 13x ITG is a 13.3-inch ultrabook that is part of the ThinkBook fashion line. The laptop looks stylish and modern, and the weight barely exceeds 1 kg, which puts it on par with the HP Pavilion Aero and other ultra-light devices with a 13.3-inch screen. The chassis is made of aluminium-magnesium alloy and fully complies with the MIL-STD-810 protection standard, making the Lenovo ThinkBook 13x ITG a valuable resource for people who spend a lot of time traveling or business trips.

In addition to the lightweight body, another indisputable advantage of the laptop is a high-end display (2560x1600 resolution, 400 cd / m² brightness, 100% sRGB and HDR support) and a capacious battery that can hold a charge for about 12 hours. Even though this is not the most record-breaking figure, even without switching to energy-saving mode, the ThinkBook 13x can work quietly all day, and connect to the outlet at home in the evening. Another advantage is the comfortable ergonomic keyboard inherited from the IdeaPad series. It has a pleasant tactile response, which is especially noticeable when printing at a speed of 350 characters per minute. Accurate monochromatic illumination is useful in low light.

Among the shortcomings, one can single out minor problems with wireless communication in some use cases and nuances associated with iron. Firstly, there is not the most modern 4-core Core i5 1130G7 processor installed here, which is good for most household and casual tasks, but still inferior to the Core i5 Alder Lake and Ryzen 5 Cezanne chips used in most competing solutions. Secondly, the insides are closed from the user in the old fashioned way, so you won’t be able to upgrade the memory yourself. However, for ultrabooks, this is more of a bonus, and not a mandatory item in the program, so we will not focus on this. Otherwise, this is a very interesting and modern ultrabook equipped with useful things like USB4 ports, Thunderbolt interface, fast charging and a fingerprint sensor. It is also worth praising the packaging: in the box with the laptop is a mouse and several adapters for connecting monitors.

After the presentation of the new generation of MacBooks based on the M1 chip, the models of the first wave began to gradually lose in price, and with some luck, Air 2020 in the basic configuration can be purchased for a little less than $900. For this money, you will get almost the same hardware as in the MacBook Pro, the same chic Retina display, but in a compact package with a silent passive cooling system and a bunch of useful little things like a Touch ID scanner, an excellent webcam with a bunch of built-in microphones, Wi -Fi 6, Thunderbolt interface and Force Touch touchpad that support pressure recognition.

As you probably already heard, the M1 chip was the first Apple laptop processor, which literally immediately allowed it to abandon the use of Intel chips. M1 is a single-chip system in the manner of mobile processors, which hosts 8 processor and 7 graphics cores, as well as a separate neural block for machine learning. The RAM is also soldered on-chip. In this modification, 8 GB is installed, for the version with 16 GB you will have to pay a significant extra. The same can be said about the SSD drive with a capacity of 256 GB. While most manufacturers have taken 512 GB as the standard, Apple continues to sell memory at a horse's markup. Perhaps this is the main disadvantage of the laptop.

However, it is more than covered by the overall system power, which is ahead of the performance of the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro with the top-end Intel Core i9. Almost any task from movies and Google spreadsheets to Photoshop Air M1 performs without the slightest strain. There are, of course, minor problems with the Rosetta emulator, but these are more questions for software optimization by developers, and not for Apple itself. At the same time, it is damn fast and energy efficient - the laptop turns on and off in a matter of seconds, and the battery holds a charge up to 18 hours. Other than that, it's still the same sleek aluminium laptop with a redesigned scissor-style keyboard, a never-ending shortage of free USB ports (there are only 2), and a high-end 2K Retina display with a 60Hz refresh rate and True Tone support.

The Swift 3 SF314-512 is a neat, well-balanced 14-inch ultrabook from Acer with an aluminium chassis and a surprisingly powerful 12-core Core i5 1240P processor. In the popular Passmark benchmark, it scores 17636 points. By comparison, the ultra-powerful Ryzen 5 5600U on a Zen 3 core falls just short of 16K points, and most competing devices under $1,000 are usually limited to 10th or 11th Gen 4-core Core i5 chips, which average gain 10 - 11 thousand points. Considering that in addition to this, Swift 3 is equipped with 16-gigabit LPDDR4X memory and a fast NVMe drive, it can be safely considered for working in Lightroom, Cubase, Resolve and other resource-demanding professional software.

This laptop combines the sophistication of a business laptop with the elegance of an ultrabook. The case is made of light and thin aluminium, the color scheme is made in a simple style, there are no decorative inserts. The aluminium body weighs 1.25 kg, easily hides in a bag or backpack compartment and does not burden you in any way, even if you carry it around all day. It is also difficult to find fault with the quality of materials and assembly, the keyboard and lid are practically not pressed through, the screen is attached to the base with the help of strong hinges. The display has the following characteristics: diagonal 14 inches, resolution 1920x1080 pixels, frequency 60 Hz, 100% sRGB. In general, the display is quite good, it will be difficult to find something more interesting in the category under $1000.

The equipment of modern ultrabooks, as a rule, keeps up with the times, so the differences concern the details. The Acer Swift 3 SF314-512 gentleman's kit includes a pair of brand new USB4 ports with Thunderbolt 4 support, Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 connectivity modules, and DTS audio support. Claimed battery life can reach 15 hours, and this is a serious result. A quick charge of 30 minutes provides another 4 hours of use. The motherboard works on the PCI-E 4.0 bus, so you can install a high-speed class 4.0 SSD into it. Against this background, small things like quiet speakers or a soldered RAM bar cannot spoil the overall impression. Well, a fingerprint scanner would not be superfluous.

The success of Zenbook ultrasounds is based not on three, but on four pillars: productive hardware, high autonomy, affordable cost and unique technical solutions such as the ErgoSense touchpad with a built-in digital block, antibacterial coating (note: this model does not have it) or proprietary AI improvers for image and sound transmission (3DNR and Smart Amp). This is an interesting model for students, freelancers, executives, entrepreneurs and other categories of users who often work on business trips or on the go, moving between home, office and conditional coworking.

At the time of its release, the Zenbook 14 was one of the thinnest and lightest ultrabooks with a MIL-STD 810G armor-piercing chassis. Compared to the progenitor, our 2023 modification has slightly gained weight from 1.17 to 1.39 kg. The thickness has increased from 14 to 17 mm, but this practically does not affect the overall positive impression of the device. The body of the laptop is made of aluminium, the lid is covered with an unusual, pleasant to the touch matte finish. The build quality is excellent. The 14-inch display is attached to the case using the proprietary ErgoLift hinge. The screen displays an image with a resolution of 2560x1600 pixels, a frequency of 60 Hz and a maximum brightness of 400 cd/m². The screen is visually pleasing and juicy, according to its characteristics it is quite suitable for conditional layout of web pages or applications, besides, it was equipped with built-in filters to reduce eye strain (note: there is a TÜV Rheinland certificate).

Powerful performance is delivered by a 12-core Core i5 1240P APU, NVMe storage, and fast 4800MHz DDR5 ( LPDDR5) RAM, which gives the laptop the noticeable boost needed to run heavy profile applications like Bitwig, Resolve and Premiere Pro . The only complaint can be made only to the location of the air ducts and USB ports, because of which the right side of the case heats up a little more than the left. But this is a trifle that fades against the backdrop of an ergonomic keyboard, an original touchpad with the ability to dial numbers, a pair of USB4 ports with Thunderbolt, a high-quality Full HD webcam with an image enhancement system, a fingerprint scanner and fast charging. Also included in the kit is a case and a USB-A to LAN adapter for a wired network connection. And this is a nice little thing.