Lenovo impressed a lot of folks with its light-as-a-feather LaVie laptops at January's Consumer Electronics Show, and now you can finally purchase a LaVie Z or LaVie Z 360 in the U.S.
Engadget spotted the availability of LaVie laptops on Lenovo's U.S. site over the weekend. The 13.3-inch LaVie Z is priced at $1,499 on Lenovo's site and promises to ship in 10-12 business days. It packs a fifth-generation Intel Core processor, runs Windows 8.1 64-bit, features a multi-touch display, gets up to 9 hours of battery life on a single charge, and weighs in at just 1.87 pounds.
The LaVie Z 360, also a 13.3-inch laptop, will set you back $1,699. It's got many of the same specs as the LaVie Z, but as the name indicates, the 360's touch display can be rotated into a tablet position on top of functioning as a typical clamshell notebook. The LaVie Z 360 weighs a couple more ounces than its non-rotating cousin at 2.04 pounds.
PCMag's Brian Westover had a chance to get a hands on with both new Lenovo laptops at CES several months ago. He described being "stunned" by how light they were—the fruit of Lenovo's partnership with Japanese manufacturer NEC, which provided super-light laptop designs for the LaVie line.
"The LaVie laptops look like the average premium ultraportables one might expect from Lenovo. The two models, the standard HZ550 notebook and the Yoga-like HZ750 convertible are roughly the same size and shape as the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, or the Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro. But while they look to be the same size, I was astonished when I picked them up," Westover wrote.
"These laptops are so light, I thought I was being conned. They aren't simply lightweight; they are dramatically so, with a featherweight design that is so much lighter than what I expected, I asked if I was looking at a pre-production mockup. It felt like an empty shell, but what I was holding were the actual complete systems. I was floored."
Despite their extreme lightness, these laptops don't skimp on system specs. The LaVie line is powered by one of Intel's latest Core i5 "Broadwell"-class chips and you can bump that up to a more powerful Core i7. You're getting 4GB of memory with an option for 8GB, a 128GB solid-state drive (SSD), Bluetooth 4.0, 802.11AC Wi-Fi, and full array of ports, including USB 3.0, HDMI, a headphone jack, and an SD card slot.