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. ®
COMMENTS
Ultrabook?
Who cares!?! Where is my decent sub-£200 netbook ya bassas!
And no, I don't want to pay the Windows tax. Supply it naked, please.
s/cheap/correctly priced/
There certainly is a rip-off going on, but not the one you suggest.....
Re: Ultrabook?
Did anyone else notice the "Small Cheap Computer" died out when they dropped the Cheap part?
Re: 'Re Metal Casing?'
You wouldn't machine polycarbonate- you would mould it. Injection moulded plastic parts can have high detail and sharp radii, cast aluminium parts can't - hence Apple's decision to CNC machine their Macbook 'unibodies'. Injection moulding time: 10 seconds. Machining time?- many minutes.
Carbon fibre doesn't shatter if used appropriately - look at the 'blades' used by amputee athletes for an extreme example of this. It is abrasion resistance that is CF's weak point, traditionally. Carbon Fibre is better than aluminium when WiFi etc antennas are used.
Aluminium works well as a heat sink, unlike plastics or composites.
Aluminium scuffs and dents, so most anodised finishes will eventually look shabby. The manufacturer doesn't normally mind- after a year the customer might eye-up the new shiny-shiny in the showroom. This is probably why we don't see the very hard wearing Titanium Nitride (drill bits, bicycle cogs etc) used instead- usually a very gold finish, can be dark grey or iridescent.
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Ideally, I would like a laptop/ultrabook/whatever with its own integrated (poss. neoprene) carry case. Plonk it down, open it up, start working.
"“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."
Really?
He can't see any use cases for any other format?
Personally I like my serial port, it's useful for a variety of things which aren't going to change, I like having an optical drive in some machines. If I don't need those, then I'll get a tablet (at the moment a transformer)
Most maybe - but I doubt all
