“Intel is giving Windows-based ultrabook makers a $100 discount to help them try to undercut Apple on price, part suppliers in Taiwan claimed late Tuesday,” Electronista reports. “Designers were getting the “marketing subsidy” in a move that Digitimes understood would lead to prices dropping five to ten percent below the $1,000 mark. The drop would follow an earlier cut expected before the end of 2011 and would presumably come from Intel’s $300 million ultrabook fund.”
“Lopping off the marketing costs would bring that same system to $840 before the profit margin and make $1,000 or less relatively simple,” Electronista reports. “Apple, without that benefit, has sold its own 13-inch MacBook Air at $1,199, albeit often with a faster processor. Companies like Acer and ASUS aren’t used to having to use higher-end parts such as aluminum and SSDs as often as Apple and have repeatedly expressed discomfort at being so close in pricing as Apple.”
Electronista reports, “Apple was also creating problems in the netbook arena, a follow-up rumor floated the same day. Intel’s delay on Cedar Trail Atom processors has now allegedly come from ‘competition from tablet PCs,’ which in the current market is shorthand for the iPad.”
MacDailyNews Take: How “ultra” can anything be when it can’t run Mac OS X. Not very. Only Apple’s MacBook Air can run all of the world’s OSes and all of the world’s apps on a lightweight sliver of perfectly-machined beauty:
All of this struggling just to create second-rate Windows-Limited knockoffs of Apple’s MacBook Air. Imagine if the PC players spent their energies on their own ideas instead of trying to copy Apple… oh, right, then they end up with this: Intel's Ottoman PC concept
