Europeans turn backs on Ultrabooks
Cheap 15-inchers or pricey Macs, s'il vous plait
Europeans don't want Ultrabooks - and their lack of interest in the platform will hit Intel's platform market share forecast where it hurts.
So reckon Taiwanese notebook component makers, quoted by DigiTimes, some of who have suggested that far from accounting for 40 per cent of the notebook market, as Intel has predicted, Ultrabooks will only stretch to a 20 per cent share.
With Europe plunged into austerity, local consumers are 15in machines, the moles said. These, you'll note, tend to be among the cheapest laptops you can buy.
The moles aren't the first to spot this: market watcher Context said last month that with traditional notebook pricing decreasing even further year on year, consumers buying notebooks over tablets are doing so with price points in mind.
Where punters are splashing out, they're doing so on Apple kit. Even though Apple makes a skinny machine, the MacBook Air, it's not - officially - an Ultrabook.
No wonder then that the likes of Acer are working on 15in Ultrabooks - Apple is preparing skinny 15in machines too, it's rumoured - the better to expand the category. ®
COMMENTS
Where are the cheap 12" notebooks?
I don't want a monstrous 15" notebook.
I don't want a 10" Netbook with barely enough power to render web pages.
I don't want a 12" Ultra book in shiny mental and SSD drive which will set me back close to £1000.
I just want a bog standard cheap laptop with a smaller screen - it doesn't have to be wafer thin - in fact I would prefer if it wasn't. So if they can flog cheap 15" laptops in PC World, why aren't there any cheap 12" laptops on display (that are not under powered netbooks or hugely expensive Ultra-books) ??
Or only Apple fans prepared to buy overpriced shinyness?
1500 lines
For 11.6" long document at 133dpI, you need more than 1500 lines.
Widescreen makes 15" screens too poor on vertical. We need 4 x 3 or even square screens.
The obsession with video is really annoying. Besides most cinema is actually NOT 16:9
To replace a 15.5" approx 1600 x 1200 ten year old 4:3 laptop you now need an 18" machine. Crazy.
Ultrabooks/macair/Ultrathin are a pointless luxury format.
Yes, it is. And so are the Windows ultrathins. Difference is, Mac lovers will happily pay a ridiculous price, Windows users won't.
