List Price: $1,149.99
Sale Price: $949.99
Today's Bonus: 17% Off
For years I've been looking for a 15" PC laptop less than 1" thick, under 4 pounds, with an SD card reader, backlit keyboard, and matte metallic finish at a reasonable price. There have been several machines that came close the Vizio CT15 (no SD card reader or backlit keyboard), the Sony VAIO T Series (too heavy), the Dell Inspiron 15z (thick, heavy, plastic body), and of course previous iterations of the Samsung Series 9 (too expensive) but the NP900X4D-A05US is the only one I've found that met all my criteria. It was worth the wait.
External hardware: A+
This machine is beautiful. Any thinner and you'd be able to shave with it. The silver magnesium chassis is a major upgrade over the previous Ash Black versions since it doesn't show fingerprints or dust. Keyboard travel is surprisingly good, and not at all shallow as I had originally expected for being in such a thin frame. The keyboard backlight is subtle yet very effective and build quality is fantastic. I remember seeing a YouTube video of the NP900X3D not having the magnet that holds the lid closed, but that has been fixed in the NP900X4D. The Elan trackpad is smooth as butter with the newest driver installed...I've even read a few posts from people with the same trackpad on laptops from other manufacturers who install the Samsung drivers because they are so good. There are lots of gestures and settings that can be tweaked though, so if you're coming from a non-multitouch trackpad there may be a little learning curve.
Internal hardware: B+
For my needs (and the needs of most people not doing 3D rendering/MATLAB/etc.) the i5 Ivy Bridge processor/4GB RAM/128 GB SSD is way more than adequate...but there are several laptops on the market with those specs that are cheaper. In this case you're paying a premium for the design. Both the RAM and SSD are upgradeable though so once SSD prices come down, making upgrades should be fairly easy.
Software out of the box: D-
I won't go into this too much since I kept the factory state for about 5 minutes, but let's just say that you'll want to do a reformat and clean install of Windows 8 (see comments for how to do this.) The amount of bloatware is overwhelming, and out of the box you're only left with ~66GB of free space on a 128GB SSD. But I guess that's the case for just about every OEM Windows machine these days.
Software after reformat/clean install: A+
I remember when computers took almost two minutes to boot up. The NP900X4D does it in 4.08 seconds! By doing a clean install of Windows 8 and removing the recovery partitions, free space increases to ~100GB, and everything works much, much faster.
Bottom line: Internally, the NP900X4D-A05US is pretty average by current standards, but it is still blazing fast for everything but the most processor-intensive tasks. In terms of design, there is not a better looking machine on the market, period. The price seems to fluctuate frequently daily (I bought mine at $899.99) so if it's higher than that, I'd suggest keeping an eye on the page as it will probably come back down.
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