Intel pushes Ultrabooks for Xmas
But admits better ones coming in the new year
IDF 2011 Intel may be keen for World+Dog to buy an Ultrabook this Christmas - it's "working with industry partners to deliver mainstream-priced products beginning this holiday season" - but smart buyers may choose to wait until 2012.
The chip giant will show off Ultrabooks based on its upcoming 22nm 'Ivy Bridge' CPU "early next year", very possibly at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January.
Ivy Bridge will be based on Intel's "3D" tri-gate transistor design.
Vendors may choose to wait too. Most of the Ultrabooks being shown off at Intel Developer Forum this week were the same set that was unveiled at the IFA consumer electronics show earlier this month.
So, that's kit from Toshiba, Lenovo, Acer and Asus. There were also sample Ultrabooks from Foxconn and Inventec, but these companies are contract manufacturers, not well known laptop sellers. None of them were quite as impressively svelte as the Acer and Asus offerings.
Intel is hoping Ultrabooks will get tablet-keen consumers buying laptops again, and it was clear from CEO Paul Otellini's IDF keynote that while Intel is certainly happy to sell chips for tablets, it would really rather you adopted an Ultrabook as your "ultimate personal companion" rather than a fondleslab.
Ultraboks will deliver "the most satisfying and most complete computing experience", he said, stressing their performance and sheer portability as laptops you can carry around as easily as you might a tablet.
Come 2013, Ultrabooks will get a new CPU still, codenamed 'Haswell', that will allow them to go into stand-by mode yet stay connected for as long as ten days, though the caveat there is that it will require "industry collaboration" - better battery tech and improved power management in the operating system, in other words. ®
COMMENTS
Nothing has convinced me that anything is better than Netbooks for very portable computing when you take into account the low cost of them. The low cost is a problem for the manufacturers, though. The profit margins, once the Microsoft cut is taken into account, are minimal. So 'Ultrabooks' must be invented.
>1024 vertical res?
If they come out with more crap squashed screens, then they'll be waiting a LONG time for me to part with any money. I'll buy an expensive Android tablet first.
Buy this <redacted> now. Better ones coming soon!
Doh!
Is this Intel's 'Doing a Ratner' moment?
"the most satisfying and most complete computing experience" AKA a keyboard. And I like ports. Lots of ports.
Anyway, isn't it always the way that the new shiny is released in Q1 so that they can shift a job lot of the current tech at a higher price to the uninitiated over xmas?
