Launched at the COMPUTEX trade show in June, Intel is putting significant weight behind a new class of laptop called the Ultrabook. We learnt more during this year's IDF show in San Francisco.
To be manufactured by Intel's extant laptop partners, the Ultrabook is presented as a fully-featured, high-performance machine housed in a stylish, slim chassis. Providing decent battery life, rapid boot times and enhanced security, the first iteration of Ultrabooks, priced at $1,000, are being readied for the pre-Christmas shopping season.
Turn it over and the non-removable battery is another nod that Ultrabooks take many design cues from Apple's trailblazer. There are no hard-and-fast rules as to what constitutes an Ultrabook, strangely, but we expect most other manufacturers to follow the same formula as Lenovo, that is, to engineer at 1-1.5kg machine with the thinnest possible form factor.
Measuring considerably less than an inch at its thickest point, the U300s takes in expected connectivity goodies such as USB 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet, and HDMI. The build quality is solid and, dare we say, somewhat Apple-like.
A question you may be asking is what Intel's part in an Ultrabook is. The chip giant suggests partners should use an ultra-low-voltage Core processor that's specified with anti-theft technology. The Lenovo machine is equipped with a 17W Core i5 2467M chip, one that carries on-board HD Graphics. Supplemented with Windows 7, 2GB of RAM, a medium-capacity SSD and 13.3in screen with a 1,366x768 resolution, there's a lot to like here, save for the price, which is reckoned to be comfortably over $1,000.
Intel hit a home run with the advent of the netbook computer. It was something new, inexpensive and compelling. Now largely cannibalised by ever-burgeoning tablet computers, the chip-maker is looking higher up the pricing spectrum for a new brand of mobile computer.
Ultrabooks will make more sense as newer technologies are adopted. A Thunderbolt-equipped machine with a super-power-frugal Ivy Bridge chip sounds like just the ticket, but we're not sure millions of people are going to pay $1,000 for the privilege of owning one, no matter how sweet it looks. And you clearly know that Apple is hardly going to sit on its hands and wait for Intel to promote this new genre. That said, does Intel care what Apple thinks? Intel's winning as long as its chips are sold in wafer-thin laptops, and it will be up to PC laptop-makers to justify the purchase of these Ultrabooks.
The Ultrabook form factor and low-ish weight are fantastic, absolutely, but you really do pay a premium for them. What's more, you sacrifice both CPU and GPU speed when compared to full-fat Core chips found in mainstream notebooks. Intel has said that it hopes Ultrabooks will constitute 40 per cent of the laptop market by the end of 2012; we don't see that happening unless the price plummets, and Ultrabooks may go the same way as the now-maligned CULV platform if they're not managed correctly. Watch this space.
