I need to find a decent business laptop for my boss.

He has given up on his MacBook Pro Retina 13", build quality is not what he had hoped for and it causes too many problems to be productive - luckily we took out Apple Care, the screen has developed around 200 dead pixels in the middle of the screen! The bad news is, we have to send the Mac away and we'll get it back in about a week, which isn't acceptable for a CEOs business machine...

He wants something small (12" - 13") and our current standard supplier is Dell, so we tried the XPS 12 with flipable touch screen. But it bluescreens a lot, whines when plugged into the mains and sometimes doesn't turn on. Dell are swapping the mainboard out tomorrow, which should solve some of the problems, but they have also told us that there will be a third revision motherboard coming in October, so they will be back again to swap it out! So he doesn't want to continue using that - he likes it from the form factor and the flipable touch screen was very useful on the plane, but it isn't reliable and that is the upmost criteria.

The Dell business range is really the Latitude, but they start with 14", as far as I can see.

So I need to find something with the following:
12" or 13" Full HD or better display
Core i7 Haswell
8GB RAM
512GB SSD
Docking port (preferable, but not a must)
Elegant design
Next Day on site support

For me that first point, the 12" - 13" display, seems to contradict most suppliers idea of a business laptop. At best it is a high end consumer Ultrabook.

I guess I am down to looking at HP Elite or Lenovo ThinkPad X240 (although I can only seem to spec that with 256GB SSD online).

What is with Samsung and Asus? Or the Acer S7? Anyone any experience here? Especially with reliability.

We've had a load of issues with Lenovo's recently, maybe 60% fail rate.
The HP Elitebooks are solid

We found a Latitude 12", which we have ordered. Thanks for the heads up on the Lenovo.

We had a duff batch of Compaqs years ago, we had an 80% failure rate! They had one faulty batch leave the factory, a couple of hundred PCs, but we managed to get 60 of them in a single purchase.

Microsoft Surface Pro 3 might be worth a look.

At work I usually try to get Samsungs although with last few I've had to also get a Ethernet/USB adapter (Samsung ATIV Book 9)

Beware Lenovo Thinkpad Edge - worst laptops I've ever had to administer. Every single laptop requires at least half a day of uninstalling, configuring and general fannying about to make it even basically usable.

• One physical drive split into 5 partitions - Recovery, EFI, System, Recovery and Recovery - so several disk imaging softwares I've tried basically just freak out.
• Will not boot from a Live disk - as in AT ALL
• Colossal amounts of bloatware
• Touchpad is basically unusable without ripping out the drivers.
• Have had a 50% hard disk failure rate over 12 months
• The audio drivers don't work properly

...and then there's the patented Lenovo Spastic Fn key. OMJF - what a beautiful Jonny Ives design decision! Make the function keys not quite the function keys and provide a Fn key to enable them. Then move the left CTRL key in one space and put the Fn key in its place so it's the same as no keyboard ever? Yep, I'll go with that.

And there's the Lenovo X1Carbon which switches off its battery and vaporises the OS