Toshiba is updating its KIRA line of thin and light laptops with new models featuring 5th-gen Intel Core “Broadwell” chips.
The company unveiled the new Toshiba dynabook KIRA laptops in Japan recently, and they’re set to go on sale in that country later this week for about $1350 and up.
Update: The new Kirabook 13 with Broadwell is now available in the US as well.
While I haven’t heard anything about a US launch for these notebooks, Toshiba has been selling KIRAbook models in the US for a few years. These laptops are usually thin, light, and powerful and the KIRA line of laptops were among the first Windows notebooks to ship with WQHD or higher resolution displays.
New models feature 13.3 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel or 2560 x 1440 pixel displays, 8GB of RAM, 128GB to 256GB of storage, and Intel Core i7 Broadwell processors.
The top-of-the-line Toshiba dynabook KIRA L93 is a 2-in-1 computer. You can detach the keyboard and hold the display like a tablet. Other models in the series will feature traditional clamshell-style laptop designs.
Toshiba’s new 2-in-1 model is said to get about 9.5 hours of battery life and weighs about 3.9 pounds when used as a notebook.
The dynabook KIRA V83 laptop with a 2560 x 1440 pixel screen gets up to 13 hours of battery life and weighs 2.9 pounds, while the V73 and V63 models with 1920 x 1080 pixel screens get up to 16 hours of run time and weigh 2.4 pounds.
Is this the one, where you can detach the keyboard only to have half of the notebook still clinging on to the “tablet” part?
http://tech2.hu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/toshiba_kirabook_l93_10_tech2.jpg
Is it just me or does it seem really difficult to justify spending this kind of money on a device that does not have a replacable battery? It seems to be a great product but batteries these days are only good for two to three years. Same issue with Apple’s laptops. The difference is there are so many of Apples products around it is not hard to find someone who chan change the battery for you. Two to three years from now I am not sure the same will be said for the Kira.