Intel Bets 2012 on Ultrabooks
The first ultrabooks are out of the gate and it appears that Intel can breathe a sigh of relief. However, Intel will be making sure that the market development will stay on track and will be funding the segment accordingly.
Senior vice president Tom Kilroy told Forbes that ultrabooks will be at the center of the company's biggest marketing campaign in 2012. After ultrabooks were somewhat slow to gain traction, Intel announced in August that it would support innovation with $300 million the company would provide through its Intel capital VC arm. Kilroy did not say how much marketing money Intel will sink into ultrabooks next year.
Intel is depending on ultrabooks to become successful and to help pick up chip sales that netbooks are losing. So far, Intel isn't selling many chips into the tablet segment. However, even with a PC market that has slowed down dramatically, Intel knows that the PC market remains by far the more attractive opportunity for processor sales over the next few years. The best argument for developing the PC market is that Intel does not have to make any bets and decide which market forecast for tablets they trust: the PC market already exists and no bets have to be made.
If the ultrabook market takes off, it may be far more lucrative for Intel than selling lower-margin processors into the tablet segment in the near future.
Unless the Ultra books come with THIS Atom:
Then yea... Not interested!
i'm still wishing for a day when laptops become as configurable as a desktop pc.
Hey Intel, can I borrow one for a week?
They're just thin and sleek laptops. It's not really a gamble for Intel. That's just the way the market is heading.
Acer has a $899 UltraBook. iPad2 is $499. Add in accessories and you're getting close.
Atoms? sorry you are wrong.
"The rest of the S3's specs are in line with the Toshiba Z830 and Lenovo U300s: It uses a low volt Intel Core i5-2467M processor, 4GB of memory, and 64GB SSD (with a 128GB option)."
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2392350,00.asp#fbid=W1ybTXm843E
There were some models, it's called a whitebook
Intel did something in the past call "Interchangeability Initiative"
which means any notebook that joins it makes notebook parts that can be interchanged with one another
Well, ultrabooks feature a strong CPU, but they sacrifice on a lot of things like a decent GPU, ports etc. It is more of a like it or not thing. I am in the not liking group, for I want a feature packed laptop even if it is 2 lbs more than an ultrabook.
Thank you. At least someone here understands...
The 2 main shortcomings of Ultrabooks vs. a regular notebook (as I see it) are that there is no built-in optical drive (does anyone still use these? -- you could still hook up an external one for the rare times you need it) and you are limited to Intel's graphics. So clearly it's not targeted at power users or gamers, but then that's what...5% of the consumer market at most?
Personally, I would go for a notebook (Nvidia/AMD graphics, high-res large display), but the rest of my extended family would go the Ultrabook route (possibly even netbooks, ick).
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrabook
First phase (Q4 2011)
Thin – less than 20 mm (0.8 inch) thickness[6]
Lightweight – less than 1.4 kg (3.1 pounds)[7]
Long battery life – 5 to 8+ hours[8]
Mainstream pricing – under $1,000 USD (for base model)[9]
No optical drive
Use flash-based SSDs[10]
Use CULV (17 W TDP) Intel Sandy Bridge mobile processors
Core i5-2467M (1.6 GHz)
Core i5-2557M (1.7 GHz)
Core i7-2637M (1.7 GHz)
Core i7-2677M (1.8 GHz)
Use Intel's graphics sub-system HD 3000 (12 EUs)