high-end laptops

New Acer Aspire Ethos laptops add detachable wireless touch-pad remotes, high-end specs

Laptop news keeps coming this week, and Acer's latest is a funky one indeed. The newly-announced Acer Aspire Ethos is a new laptop line that's aimed squarely at the high-end over-$1000 market, with a very unique twist: its touch pad detaches and becomes a wireless remote.

That's right: a remote. The design's enough to mildly surprise even the most jaded laptop expert. While the rest of the Ethos chassis is downright staid, that wide multitouch pad's transformation into a separately functioning wireless remote complete with LED-backlit controls might qualify as one of the most … Read more

New Dell XPS laptops ready to take on HP Envy

Amid a week featuring the debut of a fashionably small laptop, Dell has announced a line of products that move firmly in the opposite direction. The new XPS line of laptops are a high-end-targeted set of media-featured notebooks aimed squarely at the HP Envy and MacBook Pro crowds. The design, from a backlit keyboard to lots of anodized and brushed aluminum, feels like an upscale fusion of the Studio and Adamo lines. They aren't flashy, but they seem quite sleek, and Dell offers its arsenal of Design Studio tweaks for anyone looking to pop these XPS models up a … Read more

High-end back-to-school retail laptops: The big guns

Though budget and surprisingly affordable laptops are all the rage lately, there are still quite a few high-end models out there that aren't exactly cheap. Even so, many of these "high-end" laptops offer far more for the money than ever before, making for potentially compelling buys for people looking for big screens and superpowered processors offering desktop-replacement-level performance.

Our high-end laptops from this year's 2010 back-to-school retail roundup are actually a pretty affordable bunch, including an $829 Toshiba Portege R705-P25 that offers an executive feel for less than the white Apple MacBook. In fact, only one of these laptops breaks $1,000: the $1,349 Sony Vaio F126FM/B. In fact, the two Vaio models here are virtually identical, designwise. The more-expensive version has a faster CPU and better graphics card, but the $999 Vaio F12A may be a better overall deal, offering a big screen, Blu-ray, and mainstream/casual gaming graphics for $350 less than its big brother.

Editors' note: See our roundup of retail laptops in all price ranges.

Check out details of each system below:… Read more