Intel pushes new category of thin laptops, Ultrabooks

Jos

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Intel has unveiled design guidelines for what they claim is a new class of laptops, which will combine thinner and lighter form factors with tablet-style features such as touchscreens and near instant-on capabilities. Ultrabooks, as the company is calling them, will be less than 20mm (0.8 inch) thick and cost less than $1,000. 

In a sense this is just the natural progression of the market and doesn't sound very different from the thinnest laptops available today -- not only from a design point of view but also because some already offer near instant-on capabilities using SSDs. Samsung's Series 9 notebook is just 0.64 inches thick, although priced a bit higher at $1,150, while the 11-inch version of Apple's MacBook Air is 0.68 inches at its thickest point and starts at $999.

As new chip architectures are developed and smaller manufacturing process technologies are used, laptops are bound to get more powerful and efficient, so what's Intel really bringing to the table?

Well, for one thing, by setting some guidelines for what constitute an "Ultrabook" the company can put some weight behind marketing this "emerging new breed" of laptops at a time when netbooks are no longer hot and tablets are cutting into the PC's slice of consumers' budgets. But more importantly, Intel claims their strategy is to get really thin, really responsive systems down to truly mainstream price points of around $599 in the next 18 months.

ivy bridge

The first wave of laptops adhering to the spec will arrive in time for the 2011 holiday shopping season, with Asus, one of the initial launch partners, releasing the UX21 Ultrabook. An early sample being shown at Computex featured a unibody aluminum metal construction that's just 0.67 inch at its thickest point and weighs 2.2 pounds. It also packed an 11.6-inch 1,366x768 resolution display, a standard voltage 1.7GHz Intel Core i5-2557M processor (the MacBook Air and Samsung 9 Series use less powerful low voltage chips), 64GB or 128GB SSDs, mini-HDMI and USB 3.0.

A second wave of Ultrabooks will appear in the first half of 2012, based on Intel's upcoming Ivy Bridge processors. The company hopes to reach its goal of mainstream prices at some point in 2013 with a new Core processor design, code-named Haswell, which will half the power consumption of Intel chips compared to today's laptops, enabling thinner designs and longer battery life. By that time, Intel says, as much as 40% of laptop shipments will be in this category.


Engadget's hands-on with the Asus UX21

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Asus is on a role! producing the fonepad or padfone thing, now this little gem! hope its priced well though, i've been thinking of getting something similar and I don't want anything Apple branded but if its not it seems to cost more :(
 
So, with the fall of ultraportable notebooks comes... ultrabooks?

Thin? Check.
Light? Check.
Less ports available? Check.
Decent performance? Check.

Methinks this is just marketing shenanigans. To me, I've always just seen the different categories as netbook, ultraportable, general purpose, and desktop replacement. Some get more popular than others at times, but the needs for all of them still exist. Ultrabook is still gonna mean ultraportable to me.

Not that it won't appeal to me. It's just a new buzzword isn't going to factor in.
 
That notebook does look really good. On the other hand the name 'ultrabook' is really really lame, let's just hope it doesn't ever catch on, what's next the 'überbook'?
 
@archean I don't know about `ubook` but even `lightbook` would have sounded a lot better. What does `ultrabook` even mean?
 
That notebook does look really good. On the other hand the name 'ultrabook' is really really lame, let's just hope it doesn't ever catch on, what's next the 'überbook'?
@archean I don't know about `ubook` but even `lightbook` would have sounded a lot better. What does `ultrabook` even mean?
It means "uberbook" in English. Which in turn means "over book" in German. Or possibly "super book". There's always been a bit of contention as to what Nietzsche was talking about. Wait, got it....., "Das Uber Buch"!
 
Intel should focus on releasing tablets, not just ultrathin laptops. It's essentially the same thing I know, bar the flip flip out keyboard but still they will have refine the whole tablet UI, tweak it to Win 8 etc. Even the mighty Intel can get raped by current and upcoming cheap ARM and AMD solutions that making their way into this ultra portable mobile and tablet market.
 
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