Ultrabooks will rescue PC industry – beancounters Ultrabooks will give stagnating notebook sales and the wider PC components industry a shot in the arm, but only when prices are chopped, beancounter IHS iSuppli has warned. Low-cost laptops no longer whet the appetite of tablet iPad-hungry consumers, but PC makers didn't realise this until it was too late and a mountain of …
Ultrabook is not a marketing name attached to the Atom line of CPUs by Intel. It's attached to the CULV variants of the sandy bridge processor line. But don't worry... Ivy Bridge is coming too.
I don't want to sound like a spoil sport, but Ultrabooks can include high end graphics adapters, but they DO include the HD 3000 with 12 EUs. I won't say they compare to the GT540M in my notebook, but most games I play, I just run on the HD 3000 on this machine since it has a respectable frame rate.
So, while I'm sure you'd love to start a war between Intel/AMD or Intel/ARM, frankly, the Ultrabooks are not what you think. They are instead, netbooks with high end processors.
I personally would love one if they'd do two things...
1) Stop calling them Ultrabooks that's the dumbest name I've ever heard and I feel like I should pretend to be PeeWee Herman hitting on a girl at the library telling her about my Ultrabook.
2) Make it a requirement that ultrabooks contain reversible multitouch screens. iPad kinda sucks... tablet PCs are pretty lame. But a really thin notebook which can be used as a tablet actually sounds pretty nice.
All those manufacturers are desperately trying to bring the price of those devices down and intel is helping them out with cash and R&D support.
it won't be long before one of those guys wakes up and use all that free R&D with a Tegra3 or similar and slap windows 8 for ARM on it..
if the market for Ultrabooks doesnt pickup by the time Win8 is out. Intel will fail and will have been the maker of his own downfall...
Ultrabooks are cool and sexy and expensive and desirable - but have a limited market.
But if we made them cheaper (obviously at the expense of thin and cool and sexy) we could sell all those old crap laptops we have stuck in Dixon's warehouse - all we have to do is stick an "Ultrabook" label on them
Something small and light needs better engineering to make it durable, particularly if it's going to be carried around. I have a Macbook Air and love it, but it cost a few sheckels. It was worth it, though, because it's been beaten up and still works find three years later (though the last bang, thanks to our rampantly-running coonhounds, might have loosened the speaker).
That said, the other Ultrabooks I've seen don't seem to have quite the care in engineering and design behind the hardware. Maybe I haven't seen the right ones, but the keyboards seemed less firmly place/more spongy, and the whole thing more flexible than it should be.
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