Exactly. If you want to knock an Acer without any justification, you should be saying that Acer has a bad reputation for reliability, but without any justification other than the fact that it’s not an Air and apparently has a few problems, you can’t give something a 5. Heck, he even says it has a great build quality, which is a step in the right direction for Acer.
Agreed on this – I have a Sony Vaio S 15", which has the same “issue” with being flexible because its chassis is based upon a magnesium alloy rather than aluminum and because Sony seems to believe that flexible is a good idea. That flexibility actually saved my laptop when I loaned it to a friend. Apparently, he dropped it with the screen open from chest height onto a concrete floor. The corner crumpled in some, and now has a very clear (and rather large) dent in it, but the laptop survived the fall with no damage to anything important. My suspicion is that the flex allowed the laptop to shed the force of the fall, rather than simply carrying it on. A very rigid laptop simply carries the force of any blow suffered through the casing, as that’s what rigid things do. They feel strong, but the inner parts suffer the full force of any blow as the casing doesn’t give. In a situation where something is more elastic, it deforms and doesn’t deliver the full force of the blow. Occasionally, I wish that my laptop felt more sturdy, but after surviving that fall, I recognize that actually being sturdy is more important than feeling sturdy. Sony also does some stupid things, like coating their premium magnesium in paint so that you can’t tell that it’s an all-metal laptop on some of their models, but I wouldn’t dismiss Sony off-hand. Remember, they are the company that Apple always wanted to be.
Regarding the laptops in question – It sounds like the 13" is a great laptop, and the 11" is pretty mediocre. Apparently the flex is bad enough that it interferes with typing on the 11", and, more importantly, the keyboard is too small to comfortably use.
The Verge probably should have PC laptop reviews done by someone whose main laptop isn’t a Macbook Air. Generally, if someone is interested in Apple, they buy the Air. However, this isn’t 2011 anymore. The Air isn’t the only good ultrabook. Zenbooks, Vaio T series, and many more are actually very good laptops now, and I doubt that someone looking for a Windows PC will want to use a Macbook Air with Windows over some of the excellent options out there. I just don’t think that The Verge is trying to find anything as good as the air.
Frankly, I think that the problem might be with Mac OS X here. It’s a bit inefficient with 3d acceleration on the desktop. Remember the Macbook Pro Retina’s scrolling issues and how they went away in Windows? I’d really like to see how well this would do in Windows. Apple has a very 3d-accelerated desktop.
