Well I (and everyone else around the office) was REALLY impressed by the Timeline. A big part of the reason we even did this episode is to ensure that we’ve got a way to properly demonstrate to customers how awesome this thing is. Most netbooks had good build quality but shoddily slow hardware (sorry Atom), tiny screens (9″ is frankly unusable for me…), and horrendous keyboards (bilingual?? AUGH!).

“But Linus”, you might say, “You can get some pretty nice small form factor laptops from the likes of Sony or Toshiba!”

Yeah sure. If I wanted to pay a $800 premium just for the “ooh look it’s small like a netbook, but fast like a notebook” factor.

Enter the Acer Aspire Timeline series. These are better engineered in terms of build quality than any $699 notebook I’ve ever seen, and they’re actually a decent size! Real Core architecture based CPUs (don’t let the Pentium name fool you) with ultra low power consumption. This. Thing. Is. Awesome.