“Windows-based PC makers looking to challenge Apple’s extremely successful line of ultra-lightweight MacBook Airs with designs based on Intel’s “Ultrabook” platform are losing hope that they’ll be able to do so and still turn a profit on sales of the notebooks any time this year,” Kasper Jade reports for AppleInsider.
“Unveiled a couple of months ago at the Computex trade show, Intel’s new ‘Ultrabook’ design is a set of guidelines for PC notebook makers aimed at marrying the performance and capabilities of a traditional notebook with ‘tablet-like features’ in a ‘thin, light and elegant design,'” Jade reports. “A direct response to Apple’s hot-selling MacBook Airs, Intel says it plans to reach a 40 percent share of the consumer notebook market with the ‘no-compromise’ Ultrabook designs by the end of 2012. Its guidelines call for the systems to retail for less than $1000 and sport form-factors that are no more than 20mm thick.”
Jade reports, “The first Ultrabook notebooks were slated to arrive at that price point in time for the 2011 holiday shopping season but a new report reveals that ‘actual production costs’ to build the new notebooks are roughly as high as Apple’s MacBook Air retail prices, which could ‘render the hope [of matching the Air’s pricing] practically infeasible.'”
Read more in the full article here.