Basically, i7-6500U and i5-6200U are the same CPU. i7 got only 0.5mb/core (1mb overall). It seems i7 model is not worth to pay $120 more over i5 model.
Picked one up for 399 during Microsoft Store's 12 days of deals. I'm very impressed with it so far. It's very responsive and the screen is beautiful. Kind of wish I would've waited now. Dang it!
The Hardware side of the laptop is much larger than I expected, which I believe is due to the location of the battery since it sits in front of the screen. You can see what I'm talking about in the pictures.
Other than that I think it was an awesome purchase even at $399.
unless you need a 13", lightweight model, this looks like a good deal. only thing it is missing is an SSD (my other recommendations: FHD display, corei5 , 8GB memory). saw one of those for $60 recently...so would get that and use macrium reflect to transfer from old to new drive and this is a nice sub $450 laptop!
to be fair, i just got my wife a similarly specced Asus with traditional HDD and it hasn't really felt slow to me.
They had a similar deal for similar specs last year and I picked one up. It certainly is not business-grade build quality, but for the price and that beautiful display, a very nice buy.
In fact, last year, our local Microsoft store kept getting them in stock into January and the cool thing was they kept the price.
A nice advantage to buying at Microsft is no 3rd party crapware!
Don't forget to improve your privacy by going into the privacy settings and turning things off, for example the sharing of updates with others via the Internet.
Unless you can rotate the keyboard back and use this as a tablet buying it for the touch screen option is pretty worthless. If it could do that it would be a great deal...aside from that I'll pass....
This machine has pretty much destroyed my marriage -- I bought the previous-gen model last December and now my wife is on it 24/7. She doesn't stop to cook or do laundry. Just internet, internet, internet. Oh, and we paid $450 for the beast. On the plus side, it is rock-solid, gets 5-6 hours of battery life when unplugged, and with the obligatory SSD upgrade, runs great. Beautiful screen too.
Performance is good. I just got it. but the build quality is so poor. made of flimsy plastic.
That's always the case with consumer grade laptops no matter which company makes them.
That's why I always buy business class laptops like Dell Latitudes. The extra cost is well worth it to me.
Had one from a previous deal, returned it. Build quality is (as others have said) horribly cheap. This laptop will not hold up if you are planning any sort of heavy portability. It's also bigger than I was expecting, based on today's (even low price) competitors. I couldn't get anywhere near the claimed battery life without disabling everything, and keeping the screen uncomfortably dim, and even then it didn't hit the claims. That's not unusual for claims today, but this laptop missed it by a lot for real world use. No one has mentioned it, but at least according to Ben, this comes with 802.11N.... seriously. That can probably be updated (if Ben is correct) with an Intel card, unless it's white listed out. If so, you can always flash the bios with a third party, but of course that voids the warranty, It can be detected by customer service if/when you give them permission to remotely do problem solving. All in all, it's cheap, but in this case you get what you pay for.
Comments & Reviews (16)
Both are good deals, but the i7 got better reviews than the i5.
The Hardware side of the laptop is much larger than I expected, which I believe is due to the location of the battery since it sits in front of the screen. You can see what I'm talking about in the pictures.
Other than that I think it was an awesome purchase even at $399.
to be fair, i just got my wife a similarly specced Asus with traditional HDD and it hasn't really felt slow to me.
In fact, last year, our local Microsoft store kept getting them in stock into January and the cool thing was they kept the price.
A nice advantage to buying at Microsft is no 3rd party crapware!
Don't forget to improve your privacy by going into the privacy settings and turning things off, for example the sharing of updates with others via the Internet.
That's always the case with consumer grade laptops no matter which company makes them.
That's why I always buy business class laptops like Dell Latitudes. The extra cost is well worth it to me.
Very true. Cover's tabs are breaking in less than a week.
Thank you!