back to article Ultrabooks to finally out-ship notebooks after 20% price slash

Ultrabooks are forecast to overtake notebook shipments by mid 2012 after swingeing price cuts appear to be finally reeling in some UK punters, particularly in the enterprise. This is according to channel box-counter Context, armed with distributor sales-out stats that show a six fold rise in 13.3 inch utrabooks - 80 per cent …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Chris Collins

    Pricey

    Lordy, those are expensive. £750 for the cheapest Lenovo

  2. K

    As the person who controls the IT purse..

    Unless they drop be £450, or they become more innovative with the displays etc..

  3. James 51

    I think the lack of development of notebooks, their rising cost and the fact that lots of manufacturers are dropping their netbook lines has more to do with this than anything else. If netbooks had kept up a decent pace of development or kept their costs down then ultrabooks would be struggling even more than they are. Then there are things like the Acer v5 171 which blur the lines.

  4. smudge
    Headmaster

    Which year?

    "Ultrabooks are forecast to overtake notebook shipments by mid 2012..."

    In my location, it's currently September 2012, so shouldn't we know by now? Maybe that should be 2013?

    1. smudge

      Re: Which year?

      OK, so now I've read the rest of the article.

      ""By the middle of next year 13.3 inch Ultrabooks will overtake [same sized] notebooks,""

  5. Ralph B
    Holmes

    Told you so

    Told you so.

    1. HMB

      Re: Told you so

      Yes Ralph B, you're right, but the same thing occurred to me at the time too.

      I'm not an Apple fan, but why would I want to buy something like a MacBook, but not actually a MacBook? Why, why oh why?

      These companies see Apple making huge profits and think they can too so long as they make something similar at a similar price. Idiots I call them, just plain idiots.

      Twice as good or half the price, that's how you compete with an entrenched player.

      Personally I'm super happy with the Dell Studio 15 I got from ebay for £300 being less than 12 months old at the time of purchase. It's had a hybrid Flash/Disk dive upgrade and a bit more memory, but it does me proud and looks good too, with the one exception of the ATI HDMI out.

      ATI are so technically inept that they manage to screw up 1:1 pixel mapping on connections to 1080p TVs with the pixels being blurred by being resized again and again, while connecting to an HDMI monitor produces perfect alignment. God damn you ATI!!!

      1. jonathanb Silver badge

        Re: Told you so

        That is likely a problem with your TV rather than the laptop. Try changing the input settings on the TV to "pc mode". Most TVs have this problem. Certainly I've had that problem with both LG and Panasonic TVs on my MacBook and an HP desktop, which have Nvidia graphics.

  6. mark l 2 Silver badge

    So basically 15 - 17 inch notebooks will still be outselling 13 inch ultrabooks, so not exactly outselling notebooks is it?

  7. Christian Berger

    They'd sell even more...

    ...if they'd fill up the space to something normal again, and spend that place for a better battery and better cooling. I mean a 12-13 inch device has advantages over a 15 inch one, of course. That's why I have a small IBM Thinkpad for when I travel. However it has never occurred to me that thinner might be better. In fact since it's not trimmed down, it's fairly durable. It can stand some beating.

  8. BrendHart

    Intel seem to be completely out of touch with their market.

    Only a tiny percentage of punters care about laptop thickness (Within reason.) and practically everyone cares about price/performance. Therefore slapping a 50% premium on a machine with rubbish specs just because it is 2mm is a fools game.

    1. Christian Berger

      Re: Intel seem to be completely out of touch with their market.

      They often are. For example they could easily take over much more of the "workstation" market, by having ECC on their lower end CPUs. An Intel mainboard with integrated dual head graphics, plus ECC memory would be a great product for people who just want reliability.

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like