This fall, the tech market will witness a perfect storm as three major technologies and industry forces converge to deliver a whole host of new products for consumers.
HP has a thin-and-light notebook for almost everybody. But you can’t tell the Ultrabooks from the Sleekbooks from the notebooks.
Apple may launch a significantly less expensive MacBook Air to undercut sales of next-gen “ultrabook” style laptops due in the second quarter of this year. It’s just another rumor, mind you, but if it happened, the thinking is that it could frustrate Intel’s plans to push budget-priced ultrabooks in the second half of 2012.
Intel and its partners are about to launch the biggest promotion of a new product category called Ultrabooks since the company’s Wi-Fi based Centrino launch early last decade. And Microsoft is about to launch a major update to Windows called Windows 8 that introduces the new “Metro” touch user interface. Together they are critical products for the future of each company individually.
I would love nothing more than for Apple’s new ostensibly overhauled MacBook Pros to get here in April, but even that’s a best-case scenario, according to DigiTimes’ latest supply chain whisperers.
If you’re thinking about buying an Ultrabook–a thin and light Windows laptop that’s meant to rival Apple’s MacBook Air–you might want to wait until April.
The more Ultrabooks that got unveiled at CES, the more convinced I became that it’s silly to discuss them as if they were a coherent new class of portable computer. No two manufacturers seem to agree on what an Ultrabook should be. That’s neat, since it means they’re experimenting. And last Tuesday, Dell introduced my favorite answer so far to the question “What is an Ultrabook?” in the form of its new XPS 13.
I saw a lot of Ultrabooks at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show, but Vizio’s Thin + Light laptops stood out. Being in Vizio’s quiet press room with no distractions probably helped, but I think there are a few better reasons why these svelte laptops — which Vizio isn’t calling Ultrabooks — have me more excited than most others.
Once upon a time, the PC had no rivals. Back in the era before smart phones, tablets, Internet-savvy HDTVs and other gadgets-come-lately, it was the most important technology product in the world, and therefore inherently exciting.
In a game where every pixel, ounce and fraction of an inch counts, Samsung’s new Series 9 notebooks have fired a serious shot across the MacBook Air’s bow. Don’t expect a tame response from Apple, though.
Although Intel doesn’t build laptops, the chip maker showed off a bit of design flare at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with Nikiski, a concept notebook that folds up into a touchscreen virtual assistant.
