Intel Having Problems Getting Those Ultrabooks Under $1000

it carry intel tax due to no competition from AMD

am I the only one who starts to lose hope about bulldozer?

well well, now that there's competition on the horizon, looks like Jobs is letting the ole Apple premium drop a little

ha ha ha.....get used to it....quality and form factor is going to cost...most companies don't know this...and the same goes for a majority of the people out there

Or they could just make it 10% thicker and probably half the price...

I like the basic idea of having large notebook power in a smaller package at a price near $1000. Hope Intel, Asus, Acer, and others can pull it off - but with more ports than the photo suggests. An 11" Llano Ultrabook will also be great.

I just cant get over the Less is More theory!

I still ain't paying the premium so I can carry 1kg less weight.....
I mean, seriously? over 1k for a Core i5 mobile system ?
I can get one in "standard form factor" at just over half that price..

overpriced

There are people who work, and travel, but have a hard enough time lugging around their own luggage, and LOVE the idea of carrying '1kg less weight...'

There is a market for this, even if some of the more vocal Tom's Hardware posters are hardcore performance buffs, and therefore don't understand this...

I love my desktop. I pimp it out with the latest and greatest, no matter how much copper I have to strap on to my silicon to keep it cool... But I want battery life and portability (small weight/size) when I am on the road... Every ounce of spared weight counts...

i hope to be able to buy something like this or the samsung series 9 notebook (which is sort of like an ultrabook at a high price) at around 1K about 4 years from now, when intel get their 10/14mm processors going. Hopefully SSDs would have become cheaper and more reliable by then as well.

What i really hope ultrabooks manage to do is have gesture support like macbooks (and the samsung 9 series) do, because that + win8 (or whatever)+ 1kg weight + great performance would be really stiff competition to Apple.

I think a 13+ inch ultrabook with all this would just be sooo cool. And they'll be much more than just a fancy thing, they'd be bang for buck for a lot of people, imo.

Keep innovating bitches!

I think Acer or Asus will be able to get the pricing down only if Intel stops making a huge profit on there products. Intel always has been overpriced. That is why they can try make demands of a lower priced laptop.

You're getting more than that.
I just got my MacBook Air 13", it gives me aluminum uni-body that doesn't feel cheap. It gives me some of the best screen on the market. It gives me up-to 7 hours of battery. It gives me the cool-hand-gestures.
Most importantly, it boots up in 15 seconds and shuts down in 2 seconds, that made all my other windows machine jealous(btw, I got like 5 windows machine at home and 1 Mac).

And for the working professional, those start-up/shutdown times are critical... Those and the battery life/weight/screen quality, professionals will pay a premium for, especially since there are no other competitors in this segment yet...

I recently got a Toshiba R830. It's an i7-2620M, 13", at a little over 3 lbs with the 6 cell battery (although it has a ODD, which I could do without), but 'thicker' than a MacBook Air - and presumably, than an ultrabook.

I do look at it as a compromise, as I would rather have a 13" MacBook Air for a couple of reasons (namely the battery - this Toshiba, with this battery, does a little more than 6 hours in light office use, and the 9 cell battery adds around another lb - and the backlit keyboard), but this Toshiba cost (equivalent to) ~~650 USD plus taxes, and it's thin and light enough for me.

Right now some of us still have to compromise, yes, but look at what happened when the netbooks came to be... It will take a couple of years, but we'll get good 'ultrabooks' under 1000k soon.

There is the Samsung Series 9 and the Sony Vaio Z, but both are more expensive.

Exactly, that's what I told my friends, MacBook Air 13" is the cheapest in it's category.

There have also been quite a few in the past, Falcon Northwest makes one in the I/O, Voodoo's Envy 133 was thin and powerful when it was avaliable, There's a few lenovos that were aimed at a thin form factor, the vaios already mentioned, and many more out there. They all have been over $1000, but also under $2000 reasonably configured, so at least cheaper than the mac alternative while remaining more powerful. More is better, of course. Pretty much every "light and thin" windows laptop design so far has failed, as no one want's to pay the premium for the better build quality required for a thinner design. Those that have the money generally just buy a mac and run windows on it, probably because the better windows options aren't popular or well known.

If the herds of sheeple will fork over $$ for Apple products there will be smart(er) consumers who spend $$ for devices like the Ultrabook and it won't not because they're elitist snobs. They simply have a use for them and b/c they have an alternative to similiar Apple products.

I used to be big on ultra-portables until I owned one. They make too many sacrifices and reliability has been an issue for me, so I'm sticking to normal form factors in the future. The gains from a slight size increase are worth it.

When compares component wise, I don't find Vaio or similar products from other brands really provide a lot more for the average user on a daily basis.

And when it comes to usability, Apple is the champion. It is possible to listen to music with MacBook Air speakers and do a video group chat with clear voices coming out and recorded in.

Other brands? I don't think it is worth trying (of course, tried and compared).

I'm sorry but we really don't need another name for what's really already available

It is the fact that Intel is pushing this from the 'top down' that is intriguing.

They see that Apple is effectively accomplishing this. MacBook Air's can be had for under 1000 with the older Core 2 Duo setups. The challenge is doing this for companies that have not done this before, or have done this before, but never been able to do this economically at the sub 1k price point...

This is a lot like pushing fuel economy standards from the government to the auto industry. I am not sure this will work as intended, but something will be available at a sub-1k price point with the specs shown, I am just not sure it will be worth buying, as an average consumer, particularly if the specs are anything comparable to the established MacBook Air...

I really see no point in these laptops when you can get an AMD E-350 ultra-portable + an SSD for a lot less. For their intended use there's no need to have Sandy Bridge. You're not gonna be using processor-intensive apps on these; that's what 15-17" chassis laptops are for. They have better screens for working, and they have much more powerful CPUs, even in comparison to CULV Sandy Bridge.

Some of you will mention: "oh, it's lighter". Yeah, by 0.5 pounds. Big whoop. "OMG, it's so thin". Who the hell cares if it's 0.7" thick instead of 1.0" thick? I mean, really? You don't measure how usable something will be by if it can fit in a manila envelope like the MBA.

The main problem with them being so thin is that they have smaller batteries. As you have seen in the new MBA, the battery lasts around 4:30-5 hours on normal use. A normal ultra-portable lasts 6:30 to 7 hours.

This is just a bunch of b.s. Company's could do this easily for less than 1k, they CHOOSE not to. Greed pure and simple. $1,000 skinny laptops that perform like a $400 budget model, with less features. Trying to pull in the apple drones who care only about asthetics, price and performance be damned! All while getting kickbacks from intel. I can almost hear the cash register ringing.

I say, put some Llano in there, that should shape things up!

AppleBlowsDonkeyBalls, I agree that the E-350 is fine for almost all users. However, there are no E-350 based systems that are anywhere NEAR as thin as what Intel is stipulating. Yes, weight and battery life are key. I think the E-350 can do the battery life, but it is the responsibility of the vendors to create a chassis that will be thin and light, and preferably sturdy, so that business users will want it for a reasonable price, over an older MacBook Air...

I love my Atom netbook. It does me well. I have an SSD in it and a 9 cell battery that gives me 10 hours of real world battery life. But I would LIKE to have a better screen and a thinner chassis that requires only a 4 or 6 cell battery that gives me at least 8 hour battery life, to save weight...

Llano benchmarks SUCK. AMD's business model of the APU is flawed. With intel able to stick a 2nd gen i7 into such a thin platform what's the point of Llano or any of AMDs APUs? An i7 plus even a value discrete GPU blows Llano out of the water and forgot about APUs.

Yeah but Llano COMPLETELY blows your i7 integrated graphics away. Besides with most of these ultrathins you cant even add discrete card, so your point is moot, intel fanboy.

To me I don't care about how thin a notebook or netbook is.
I care most about the battery life and performance (and that is a trade off too battery life vs performance).
Also I prefer that the battery can be easily removed and replaced with a 2nd charged one in case the battery gets low (needs recharging) or fails (easy replacement).

Can I have my ThinkPad X320 now? For $1300 or less?

Because that's an ultraportable I can live with (as long as they add the IPS screen option from the X220's since the screens on the X300/X301 were reportedly pretty bad).


I'm sorry, but the optical drive on a notebook is just not ready to go. I don't buy all my shows online or torrent/Usenet them. And so if I want to watch a movie, I'm hosed without an external DVD drive that defeats the purpose of being so thin and light.


And I'm not about to spend 1000 dollars on a consumer-level laptop that will break if it is dropped, sat on, watered, etc., because I could have bought 2 500-dollar laptops (which have around the same specs as these machines minus the SSD) for that price.
I can accept the loss of a simple netbook in this fashion since they're so cheap but that's hard to justify for an Ultrabook.

So I'll stick with a fully-functional thin-and-light book like a ThinkPad T420s (which isn't super-thin but it's close) for the same price as one of these machines.

These days my gadgets have 1 common thread, None have an Intel processor. I use an Android phone, iPad 2, HP dm1-3020us and AMD Athlon II X4 based desktop. Intel just doesn't cut it.