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Engadget's holiday gift guide 2011: laptops
Welcome to the Engadget Holiday Gift Guide! We're well aware of the heartbreaking difficulties surrounding the seasonal shopping experience, so we're here to help you sort out this year's tech treasures. Below is today's bevy of curated picks, and you can head back to the Gift Guide hub to see the rest of the product guides as they're added throughout the holiday season. Let's get this out of the way: a laptop is an intimate gift. Even if you were to get away with paying just $400, it's a lot to spend on even your spouse (ten years is the netbook anniversary, right?). Not to mention, your lucky giftee will be spending more time with it, perhaps, than they do their friends, families and pets. At the same time, the selection is nothing if not overwhelming, and if you were to make a spreadsheet tallying prices and specs, you'd notice an uncomfortable similarity across different brands. So, we rounded up some of the best we've seen -- everything from all-purpose notebooks to Ultrabooks to high-end dream machines. If you're thinking of pulling the trigger, hop past the break for a few ideas and the (very brief) low-down on the trade-offs you'll be making.
OWC unleashes Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G SSD, peps up your 2011 MacBook Air
So, you've got a 2011 MacBook Air, and you say its SSD's read / write speeds are letting you down? Well, Other World Computing would be happy to quell your woes with its SandForce-equipped Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G. The company's latest storage upgrade steps things up from its 3Gb/s versions, promising to get your tasks zooming with consistent speeds of "over 500MB/s" (achieved by utilizing the '11 Air's SATA Revision 3.0, 6Gb/s bus). The 120GB variant will set you back a wallet-thinning $350, while 240GBs will cost you a whopping 600 bones -- hey, no one ever said performance like this comes cheap. They're available now from OWC, and you'll find full details in the PR past the break.
