When comparing HP Spectre x2 vs MacBook Air, the Slant community recommends MacBook Air for most people. In the question“What are the best 12" laptops?” MacBook Air is ranked 1st while HP Spectre x2 is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose MacBook Air is:
Macbook Air has a high quality all-aluminum body that looks great and is sturdy enough that worries of accidentally damaging are mostly alleviated. It has a robust lid, well-spaced back-lit keyboard and an excellent button-less trackpad.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Sturdy but elegant design
The top part is the slate-style tablet which can be detached from the bottom part (which is the keyboard). It has a glass slate look which reminds of the same look as the Apple iPad with a glossy top surface.
Pro Keyboard cover included
The keyboard cover is included in the base price.
Pro Solid build quality and elegant design
Macbook Air has a high quality all-aluminum body that looks great and is sturdy enough that worries of accidentally damaging are mostly alleviated. It has a robust lid, well-spaced back-lit keyboard and an excellent button-less trackpad.
Pro Great keyboard
The MBA has a well-spaced, back-lit keyboard with convex keys and placed in way that the resting arms on the sides of the trackpad is comfortable.
Pro Good battery life
The 11" model lasts up to 9 hours and the 13" model up to 12 hours. Great for programming on the go as you don't have to worry about the battery dying.
Pro Best-in-class trackpad
MBA has an excellent button-less muti-touch trackpad that's highly accurate and comfortable to use.
Pro OSX is developer-friendly
OSX is based on XNU (Darwin) kernel, it's certified Unix and arguably a lot more developer friendly than Windows. Development for Unix is native on OS X.
There's a large selection of great development tools available for OSX. The operating system itself comes bundled with a powerful terminal emulator, called Terminal. Additionally, Apple provides tools, like Xcode, an IDE that contains a comprehensive collection of tools for developing OSX and iOS software, for free.
Cons
Con Keyboard cover is not ideal for long typing sessions
Since the laptop needs to be angled up at the back when typing, it can give a feeling of typing over thin air, making it a bit clunky when you have to type in long sessions.
Con Low resolution screen
Depending on the model, the MBA has either a 1366 x 768 or 1440 x 900 screen and that's behind the expected 1080p screens of most modern ultrabooks.