Gartner: Ultrabooks aren't tickling anyone's fancy The global PC market contracted in the last three months of 2011 and Ultrabooks failed to take off, Gartner's preliminary results showed yesterday. A rise in the demand for PCs during the quarter in both Asia and Latin America was not enough to offset the drop-off when compared to the same period in 2010 in the United States ( …
iWant one and iWill get one very soon. So glad I don't have to buy something from Smaug's Cupertino Castle as only the MacBook Air fitted the bill until very recently.
Robert is right: Gartner, the people that said Itanic was the future in the datacentre! When it so bloody obviously wasn't to anyone who had an ounce of common sense.
If you're an average consumer, sure, WiFi is usually fine. But if you're doing system administration or network troubleshooting (as I imagine a large portion of El Reg readers do), the size and portability of the MacBook Air is wonderful, but the lack of a true low-latency Ethernet interface makes it unusable.
seems to me to be that there is no effort at promoting Ultrabooks as a brand - yes, there are a lot of manufacturers, but this is Intel's big idea and there doesn't appear to be any effort being put into selling that big idea. Cupertino's still going to get the sales because Ultrabooks are about as expensive as the Air but without the brand cachet that fruit-based products have.
Not sure ultrabooks are Intel's big idea - Intel have been doing high price, small form factor laptops for years (i.e. ULV/CULV) and they never caught on because of the high price.
And before anyone points at MacBook Air's as a successful "CULV/ultrabook", they are priced similarly to there MacBook cousins. Compare an ultrabook price to it's slightly heftier laptop cousins with similar technical specs....
I can see why Intel and vendors want them to success (nice high margins), but I can't see it happening in the real world.
...is Intel's term and any machine using it has to meet a clear set of minimum specifications. It's the sort of "marchitecture" approach that they've used before, e.g. with Centrino, where it wasn't enough to have the right processor, you had to have Intel throughout (so Dell's laptops were Centrino if they used Intel WLAN adapters, but not if they used Dell's own). See http://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/sponsors-of-tomorrow/ultrabook.html for details ; I don't blame you for not getting that (downvoting me's a little harsh, though), since while it is clearly a big thing for Intel the promotion of the concept has been woefully lacking, as I noted. I'd also note that SOME Intel CULV based machines have done pretty well (Acer's Timelines for instance).
The economy is shit and people realise they don't need a bleeding edge pc to browse facebook and given news that win8 is on the way why waste money on a win7 machine?
Windows just isn't offering value for money with a lot of entertainment being online now. Unless people need legacy support for software there is little to no reason to own windows and I think people are realising this which is why they're flocking to windows-free tablets and phones.
I wanted a netbook originally, but found a Samsung with an 11" screen which did not cost a kidney....
I hardly ever need a optical disk drive, and having a decent amount of power in a moreorless netbook size is very handy. Don't use it all the time, but great for the occasions I do.
Want to get work to replace the Dell latiitude I have now for something smaller and more portable...
Analysts generally don't know shit from sherbet in my opinion though...
Think of this, if Apple would have a 400$ but thicker portable and next to it on the same shelf a thinner but 1500$ portable, which one people would chose ?
The problem is that retailers are already chocked with Windows portable PCs in all form factors and within a wide range of pricing. You'll have to be insanely rich to buy an ultrabook at more than 1000$ when you can settle for a netbook or a notebook in the range of 250$ up to 700$. And if you really crave for a thin computing device, then tablets will be waiting for you at somewhere between 400$ and 700$.
Both math and common sense are stacked against ultrabooks.
Memo to Intel and manufacturers: you already lost the battle so why not make them 100% Linux and Android compatible and sell them without Windows tax for those who require it. That would be a compelling reason for freetards to buy them in spite of the high cost. I for one will be the first one to buy one. Spending 100$ for another Windows PC in my home, no that fast.
if they were priced reasonably and deliver the oh-so-revolutionary battery life, not to mention performance they promised. And Intel and pals somehow believed they'd be the hottest shit in the middle of recession, regardless of this funny pricing, and (not)-so-f-revolutionary specs? Right.
Why are "PC vendors" restricted to only those companies that produce PCs preloaded with Microsoft OS?
Since when does "Personal Computer*" = "PC" = "Microsoft OEM" ?
Why are PC's that are not preloaded with MS OS not included in the statistics?
Why are they not referred to as "Microsoft OEMs", as in "Lenovo was the top MS OEM of 2011" ?
* I am aware that the first IBM was called a "PC" and hence the IBM clone's inherited the same moniker but that is ancient history and surely it is about time to move on from such archaic distinctions. Apart from the OS, what is the practical difference between an apple PC and all the rest?
It would make all those I'm a Mac, I'm a PC ads look a bit stupid and pointless (even though they were anyway). On top of that you have a shed load of Apple users who would rather have their toenails pulled out with a pair of pliers rather than admit to owning a "PC" when in actual fact what they own is a "Mac" or a "Macbook" or an "Air", etc and what they most definitely don't have is a "PC". Basically it's just something that's stuck over the years and to be honest it works perfectly well. you either have a PC which can run Windows, Linux, OSX and god knows what else and you have an [Insert Apple band name here] which can run OSX, Windows and I don't know what else as I don't have or want one.
Maybe it's because I'm all atwitter about the news about the Raspberry Pi going into production, but it seems to me that there are only a few metrics that really interest me about this segment of the market (basically, low-powered, cheap PCs). The first two are LCU(*)/GFlop and Gflops/watt. Unfortunately, the entire netbook market has either stagnated or regressed on both of these fronts since their first introduction. It's not as if screen size or installed RAM has broken out of the (alleged) plateau (allegedly) imposed by Wintel, and Flops/watt has only improved marginally, at least in the Atom/SoC world (and you can forget about low power usage outside of Atom in the x86 world).
The other thing (not really a hard metric as such) is the number of available cores and ease of programmability of these extra cores. A lot of SoC chipsets will handle video decoding and a modicum of accelerated graphics processing, but it's very hard to put those bits of hardware to good use for general programming tasks. OpenCL is nice, but where are the frikkin drivers?
So that's why I'd rather invest in 6--12 RP boards and a few USB hubs and Ethernet switches over ultrabooks, tablets, smartphones, e-readers or any other deliberately crippled sub-notebook format. I may be wrong, but I think a lot of people agree with this sentiment.
(*) Local Currency Unit. I like putting spare netbooks to work in parallel transcoding clusters when they're not downloading web pages or showing short/interruptible videos. That's why $£€/GFlops matter to me. As does GFlops/watt.
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