Notebook makers cautious about Ultrabooks
Initial production runs limited, moles claim
Notebook makers are playing it cautious with Ultrabooks, it seems, limiting shipments to 50,000 or less as the gauge demand through the remainder of 2011.
So say manufacturer moles cited by DigiTimes. Their caution is explained by their experience with past Intel notebook initiatives, most notably for so-called "CULV" - Consumer Ultra Low Voltage - skinny laptops, which failed to catch the public's eye.
Branding a slimline laptop 'Ultrabook' makes more sense than calling it a 'CULV', but Intel's move to brand the new machines more sensibly than the previous ones doesn't appear to have convinced manufacturers, at least not entirely.
Intel is said to want 40 per cent of 2012's notebook shipments to be taken up by Ultrabooks which, it hopes, will go some way toward reversing the trend toward tablets.
The initial run of Ultrabooks from Acer and Toshiba - you read our first impressions of these two vendors' machines here and here - and from Lenovo and Asus will take place in September with a view to sales starting through retail the following month.
We expect Intel to say a lot more about Ultrabooks at next week's annual Intel Developers Forum, in San Francisco. We'll be there, and we'll let you know what it says. ®
COMMENTS
Thin 'n Light
Thin and Light used to be the name for this category. I've had P3 and Pent M versions and there is a huge difference between these and a cheap laptop both in weight and size when I put one in my backpack and go to work. A netbook would likely suffice for this, but I despise glossy screens. And I still prefer a conventional format 12.1" screen to a 16:9 or 10 10.1". The 11.6" are rare, and 12.1" nearly non-existent in netbooks.
No kidding
"Intel is said to want 40 per cent of 2012's notebook shipments to be taken up by Ultrabooks which, it hopes, will go some way toward reversing the trend toward tablets."
Well, there's another behemoth unprepared for a new, in-retrospect-obvious paradigm shift. Good. Keeps people on their toes. If only it did the same for upper management as it does for people.
"failed to catch the public's eye" or just overpriced for the plastic bombers they were?
"Consumer Ultra Low Voltage - skinny laptops, which failed to catch the public's eye" (the last time around)
Don't think they "failed to catch the public's eye, they were just overpriced and plasticky...
I don't want to buy a Mac, I can't stand the OS, and while they will run windoze with boot camp, they are not optimized and run much slower with windows than comparable hardware made for windows.
So, if only, I could get a solid metal PC notebook, carved from a block like Apple's, and not given to some schmuck designer who thinks lots of 'decorative' crap and different hues on all surfaces equal good design.
@AC 11:12, WRT MBA
My MacBook Air overheats very quickly and then slows down to a crawl. Samsung Q40 was _definitely_ better (and ran faster under overheat conditions) aside from its cheap plastic case. And Q40 didn't have any stinking fan in it, it just dropped from 1.2GHz to 800MHz when it was getting hot, but its speed even at 800MHz remained acceptable, contrary to MBA. AFAIU MBA doesn't drop MHz/CoreVoltage but forces CPU to spend 90% of time in idle loop so that you experience 10x drop in performance.
Ultra Low Voltage
It can't be ULV unless it's ARM with some kind of Unix on top, and in order to succeed with that the Unix must be either Mac OS X or Debian derivative.
Mine's with Debian on ux380n in a pocket.
