“Intel’s new ‘Ultrabook’ initiative designed to help PC manufacturers churn out MacBook Air clones has hit a snag,” Chris Rawson reports for TUAW.
“According to Digitimes, Apple has gobbled up almost all of the available capacity for producing unibody aluminum parts, which it uses to build the chassis for its notebooks,” Rawson reports. “Production capacity for these parts is so constrained that PC manufacturers are reportedly only able to produce one chassis every three hours.”
Rawson reports, “Stories like this certainly show how the tables have turned in the past ten years. Today, PC vendors who try to compete with Apple on both features and price almost inevitably find they have to sacrifice one or the other. Ultrabooks are no exception; Apple’s supply-side savvy has allowed it to lock up a significant portion of manufacturing resources, leaving less and less for the rest of the industry.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Oh, but wait, wasn’t Apple instead supposed to blow cash pile and the leverage it commands on unnecessary stock buybacks and dividends?
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]