Asus U46E-BAL6

Asus U46E-BAL6

In an era of thin laptops and Ultrabooks, to be thin is starting to feel like less of a novelty and more of a requirement. Thin, however, is relative: are you talking about the razor-thin world of Ultrabooks, or the not-quite-as-slim world of thin full-size laptops? In the case of the Asus U46E, thin means "normal-size, but pleasingly compact"--like the Dell XPS 14z, this is a full-fledged 14-inch laptop with an optical drive, but it's only about .1 inch thicker than a MacBook Pro. The U46E is part of a family of thinnish Asus laptops that I've been bullish about for years, going back to the UL30A. The U46E-BAL6 continues the trend while throwing in tons of power under the hood of a pretty compact computer: a dual-core Core i7 processor, a 750GB hard drive, and a whopping 8GB of RAM. What price would you pay for such a laptop? The U46E-BAL6 goes for $829 at retail, and that's a pretty good value for what you're getting--especially compared with the similar 13-inch MacBook Pro, which starts at $1,199, or the $999 Dell XPS 14z, which has a slower Core i5 processor, 6GB of RAM, and a 500GB hard drive. In the word of Windows laptops, $600 is becoming a more commonplace midrange price.