Intel Not Shipping Nearly As Many Ultrabooks As They Hoped
At least that’s the purview of market research firm IHS iSuppli, which has slashed sales expectations for ultrabooks this year from 22 million units down to 10.3 million. In 2013, the prospects look better--the firm believes that the number of ultrabook sold will more than quadruple to 44 million--but that’s still far short of previous expectations, which had that number pegged at 61 million.
In addition to high prices, IHS iSuppli doesn’t see the kind of buzz about ultrabooks that PC makers were surely hoping for. “There once was a time when everyone knew the ‘Dude you’re getting a Dell’ slogan. Nowadays no one can remember a tag line for a new PC product, including for any single ultrabook,” said Craig Stice, senior principal analyst for compute platforms at IHS.
The firm believes that these problems are not insurmountable, however, and that a price point closer to $600 (which is looking increasingly like a reality) coupled with the Windows 8 operating system and additional features that will make consumers drool--such as touchscreen capabilities, removable screens for tablet-like usability, Intel’s upcoming Haswell processor, multiple display support, hand-gesture recognition, and GPS functionality--will contribute to much better sales numbers.
Regardless, IHS iSuppli figures to see ultrabook sales push up to 95 million shipments by 2016, which isn’t terrible, although it may still not be ideal. There’s a lot of tough sledding ahead for any PC form factor, however, as the competition from tablets and smartphones continues to stiffen.
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They cost too much for people to buy. They're nice, but so what? I would not want Win-8 on it. I would probably remove it and use Win-7. |
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Yeah dead on, they just cost way too much. |
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I would get an ultrabook or an ultrathin like the Lenovo U310 if it had an SSD only, not an HDD with SSD caching. The price point is right and performance would also be awesome, just gotta wait for cheaper SSD prices I guess. Also I wouldn't get windows 8 unless I had a touchscreen, some of the new models from Asus and acer give the user the possibility to properly utilize the the windows 8 interface. Still not for power users though I would think since I saw some screenshots of the test version of W8 that some people downloaded and played around with. The W8 interface looked terrible with a lot of random tiles and tons of empty space. Haven't looked into it too much in the last little bit maybe things have improved. |
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Ultrabooks have more performance than what most people need. they need a new category using i3s and ssds. Hell, most people even overrate the space they have and an external tb costs all of a hundred bucks. Most people dont even care about the disc drive. Honestly, i3 plus ssd is all I need and I have spent stupid amounts on my desktop. Add a large four battery and I am sold... though a mechanical keyboard would be nice. |
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Hmm; I don't know for the price point, you could buy a lower priced similar unit not called an "Ultra-Book", but still relatively light weight with a good display and is relatively energy conservative then throw a 150 dollar SSD, say a 250GB which I have seen recently and bam you have the same or relatively. Just like the new Microsoft unit the price line is just to high to me. |
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rapid1 has a point, I've been flirting with the idea of getting a bracket to mount an SSD in the optical drive bay. this way u get the storage and performance. I don't know if this will reduce the weight and probably won't affect the battery in a positive way but it gets rid of some hardware that I don't use for something that I definitely would. |
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I remember when a cheap processor was $100.000. Oh for those days! Renee |
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There are plenty of good processors at around the $100 price point? |
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I even have experienced that it cost me more than what I expected. |
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