I have to agree - I love all the technical details in these articles so much that I used to read them in detail long before I switched to the Mac... It was probably the biggest thing that convinced me to change (that, and I wanted a laptop that didn't look and feel like cheap plasticy rubbish, which apart from Apple products were few and far between then).

Has anyone here tried any of the macbook air clones?

http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/models/aspiresseries

This isn't really the right place for that question, but all of those have bad resolution screens, as do all of the linux-able ultrabooks. I'm not saying that they should be Retina, but 768 vertical px is unacceptably regressive.

The Asus zenbook prime 11" and 13" are shipping with full hd ips screens.

That's nice to see, thanks, but at a 50% premium over an MBA (including Windows tax).

I'm not sure which model you looked at, but I believe the 13"/4g/128gb is priced at $1100 msrp vs. similarly configured air at $1200. Microcenter had it for $1000 a few weeks ago.

I think I was probably looking at list price.

I have a ZenBook from asus (UX21 with i7) and it is great: slim, fast, neat screen.

His reviews are what got me interested enough to Switch back in 2002.