[smasty]

I have good experience with Asus as well. Until recently I was still using my early 2011 Asus U36JC. It was probably one of the first ultrabook-like laptops, even though it wasn't branded as one, since it had a second discrete GPU. Reasonably thin at 19 mm and 1.4 kg, with stellar battery life (10h+ under Debian) and great performance. Even though it had 1st generation Core i5, it was still snappier then most of my classmate's laptops with latest i5s. It even had a USB 3.0 port, which was something for a ~700€ 13" laptop at that time. Over the time I upgraded to 8GB RAM and swapped the disk for SSD. Only downside was a pretty crappy glossy screen, but I mostly had it hooked up to an external monitor so I didn't mind so much.

I finally decided to go for a new laptop last December because the battery life was degrading after the years. I was consideing just buying a replacement battery, but I wasn't able to find one under $200 including shipping and I got a really good deal on a top of the line refurbished X220 together with a docking station for 380€.

My sister, a teacher, is now using the Asus laptop and not considering the battery life it still runs smoothly.