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Sub-£400 svelte lappies hurled in Ultrabook preemptive strike

Here's something we made cheaper

Taiwan-based laptop vendors are planning a push in the second quarter to fill what they see as a gap in the market for cheaper ‘Ultrabook-style’ machines before Intel’s Ivy Bridge rollout makes the real thing more affordable.

Tech manufacturing rag Digitimes claims that the vendors are likely to use cheaper components in order to produce devices that offer the same super-svelte appearance as Ultrabooks, but don’t meet Intel’s strict hardware requirements.

Metal casing, solid-state drives (SSDs), expensive hollow hinges and Sandy Bridge processors have all combined to push the production costs of the first generation of Ultrabooks up to around the $1,000 (£636) mark, the report added.

However, sensing the uncertainty around the release date of Intel’s forthcoming Ivy Bridge processors, which are likely to be discounted when they finally arrive to promote sales, the unnamed laptop-makers are apparently taking the initiative and could sell these Ultrabook-lite models for as low as $600 (£380).

The hardware-makers had better be quick though, with Chipzilla claiming it has three factories working towards a possible April launch date for the new 22nm processors.

Juniper Research will no doubt be pleased at the latest news from Taiwan as it validates research the analyst pushed out in January which predicted that hardware makers would increasingly craft their models with the look and feel of Ultrabooks.

“All notebooks in five years’ time will look like Ultrabooks; it’s just the way things are going,” report author Daniel Ashdown told The Reg at the time. ®

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