I'm surprised that battery life hasn't been mentioned more times already. I recently went shopping for a new ultra-portable laptop, even though I had one that would regularly give me 6+ hours of actual use (10 claimed IIRC). The 13" MBA I'm typing this on was just way better than anything else, and I regularly get 8-10 hours out of it. It's also dead silent unless I'm playing graphically intense games, which is notable because fan noise is another problem that severely afflicts many machines in this category. I won't risk making either battery life or fan noise worse by installing a whole different operating system and drivers, so I just keep running OSX and iTerm2. If I ever saw actual proof that an *out of the box* Linux install on something like a Yoga 2 Pro or the latest X1 Carbon would work as well then I'd gladly do that too, but that has been such an often-made and never-met promise in the past that it might take more than one person's word to convince me. My time is worth more than the price differential between MBA13 out of the box vs. hours of research plus purchased alternative plus even more hours pulling all the bits together.