The world's most extreme laptops

Some laptops will give you a hernia, while others will fit in a coat pocket. Some cost a day's pay--others, half a year's. Here are the outliers of the notebook world.

By Ian Paul

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The Most Beautiful

Name: MacBook Air

Price: $1499 and up

Availability: Now

Extreme spec: Droolicious

Reasons to love it: Ever since the MacBook Air debuted in 2008, this computer has been the superhot ultraportable to beat.

The Air, featuring a sleek aluminum unibody enclosure that's just 0.76 inch at its thickest point, has a full-size backlit keyboard, multitouch gesture support, and a crisp 13.3-inch LED-backlit display. Other specs include the option of a 1.86GHz or 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a 120GB hard-drive or 128GB solid-state drive, 2GB DDR3 RAM, an nVidia GeForce 9400M graphics processor, an iSight Webcam, and both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity.

On the downside, the Air is the slowest MacBook available, it has no optical drive, and it's a little stingy with USB and FireWire ports. But whenever you're out in public with this silver beauty, the Air is guaranteed to turn heads and make the other laptops jealous.

That's just my opinion, though. You might want to check out the Air's ultraslim and (almost) equally gorgeous competitors, such as the Samsung X360 and Dell Adamo. Hewlett Packard has also been developing a hot line of ultraportables, starting with last year's Voodoo Envy 133 and the new 13- and 15-inch Envy laptops available October 18.

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