eMMC and relative build quality aside, the main focus of my rant pertains to the displays.
I am looking to replace a 2009 Acer craptop that is slowly falling to pieces. Its fan turns on only when needed. But it's loud, even by non-SPCR standards. It has three speeds: off, panic loud, and super loud. I wish the fan spun slowly all the time - I bet
panic-loud could be largely avoided. There are plenty of questionable design decisions with my laptop, but the fan behavior is by far the most annoying. The 2nd most annoying is a wlan led that blinks AT ALL TIMES (black electrical tape to the rescue). 3rd is the terrible 768p display.
The Yoga 2 is pretty costly. If I'm going to spend $1200, I'd likely buy Lenovo's t440s. Or a 13" retina macbook pro. There are rumors of a "retina" macbook air refresh this year. I don't really care about retina (or other ultra-high DPI displays); I just wish they'd abandon TN panels.
I actually ordered, and subsequently cancelled,
this refurbished Asus Q501LA-BBI5T03 ($480). It has a lot going for it (1080p IPS display, i5-4200u, backlit keyboard, low price). I got scared by some of the comments in
that model's notebookreview.com thread as well as the aforementioned slickdeals thread. Potential hardware failures + a 90-day refurb warranty, wlan lottery, maybe with/without a mSATA slot, strangely omitted recovery partition. As cheap as it was ($480 for haswell + 1080 IPS), it wasn't exactly what I am looking for.