Intel labels Ultrabooks a “Failure”

[Lil Frier]

I always hated that term, but I don't get how they are a failure. Some won't care greatly for a more-cramped keyboard that you'd get with a 10-inch hybrid, when compared to a 15-inch laptop. Calling "ultrabooks" a failure is to claim that laptops are dead, I think, because such devices are the natural evolution of laptops (thinner and lighter). I mean, other than maybe a Bay Trail T100 or a Surface Pro, I would say that anything else running full Windows 8 fits the profile of an ultrabook. Even an IdeaPad Yoga or an XPS12 fits the bill, they're just called "hybrids" instead. They're lighter and thinner than previous laptops (or the current-gen ones in the cub-$700-or-so sector).

While people might be migrating to hybrids over the rigid, non-convertible "ultrabooks," I'd call only that branding a failure, as we're still talking about the immediate future flocking to hybrids running Bay Trail and Haswell i5s, which still means money in the pockets of Intel.

EDIT: Wow, after reading the rest of that article...the stupidity is palpable. They say that ultrabooks were a failure from the start. They say that hybrids are D.O.A. What do they consider "the future," nothing but Macbooks? I mean, if we're not going for a thinner and lighter device, and we're not going for something with more usable physical modes (tablet and laptop), we either get bigger (but desktops are dead too, right?) or we stay the same.

This article seems really keen on calling Intel doomed and saying that everything they look at is wrong, but I don't see a single thing pointing to WHY hybrids won't work, why Intel is being run "into the ground," or what alternative form factor would actually save them.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Was a nice quote on another site:

If Charlie's $50 a pop "insights" were even, shall we say, semi accurate then AMD would have a larger market cap than Apple and Nvidia would have been out of business 5 years ago.

 

[mrmt]

Everyone who spends a lot of time on airplanes or in clients will pick an ultrabook over everything else.

 

[Lil Frier]

Everyone who spends a lot of time on airplanes or in clients will pick an ultrabook over everything else.

Are you saying that the niche for ultrabooks going forward is male prostitutes?

 

[itsmydamnation]

Everyone who spends a lot of time on airplanes or in clients will pick an ultrabook over everything else.

my exp ( i travel a lot) is people pick apple :hmm:

 

[Abwx]

I wouldn't call them a failure really, its just the form factor costs a lot of extra money because of how thin and light it is.

Do you think that a desktop PC + screen are intrinsicaly
cheaper to produce than a laptop.??

 

[podspi]

Do you think that a desktop PC + screen are intrinsicaly
cheaper to produce than a laptop.??

Easier to design.

 

[blackened23]

Ultrabooks should have been designed as the EEE-PC v2 : 500$ good enough in every way, but never great.
Instead they went for 1400$+ abominations which were worse than the Air in every single way.

Something like this : http://www.materiel.net/ordinateur-portable/asus-vivobook-s200e-ct182h-92014.html
But NO touchscreen, No Bloatware, Decent 720p LCD, 128Gb SSD, +250G of Battery, 5 different colors and it would be perfect.
With all the other stupid requirements "max width, max weight, min shutdown/restart, etc etc" they just killed it.

It was just a project designed to sell overpriced 300$+ ULV chips in 1200$ Laptops, to offer a windows alternative to Apple.

I'm not sure where you get this mythical 1400$ figure. I've seen TONS of ultrabooks for the 600-800$ mark in the past year. The main difference in the market now is that people are willing to pay for quality - that is why many users gravitate to Apple products. Say what you will about them but they absolutely do make fantastic quality products, which cannot be said for the average PC Oem. Luckily, PC OEMs are starting to wake up and realize this. I'm quite impressed by some of the upcoming ultrabooks such as the Yoga Pro 2, Sony Tap, and the Surface Pro 2. This is what PC OEMs need. Quality devices. Not bargain bin garbage - as I said, the market is willing to pay for quality now, there has been a dramatic shift in the past 3 years or so. This is why Apple has sales in the stratosphere. Quality products.

I don't even know why we're discussing this. Semiaccurate is an AMD Fanboy website with no journalistic integrity or objective news. This entire article was nonsense to generate page hits, nothing more.....Maybe some AMD fanboys believe his "secret" sources though. The same sources that told him Apple has a fab.

 

[sm625]

I took semiaccurate off my fast dial the other day. Just sick of the paywall crap.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Hmmm... That thing gets bad reviews. The screen is poor, like my Acer, which would put it even below the MacBook Air, which already has a poor to at best mediocre screen. Plus the thing doesn't even have a full sized keyboard, which to me is an immediate deal killer.

I agree to some extent. If I were paying the full retail on them ($600 IINM), I'd be unsatisfied. As it is, I'm quite happy with them (with two caveats : blew away Win8 and replaced it with Win7, swapped out the slim 5400rpm clunker with a 256GB SSD).

As far as the full-sized keyboard, you have to make some tradeoffs to get 11.6". Battery life isn't the greatest (~4.5 hours is the best I got), but sufficient. It's not as thin and light as a real MBA, but again, for <= 1/3 the price, good enough. With an SSD, I can cold boot and be launching Photoshop in < 15 seconds.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

I love my ultrabook, it's the Zenbook Prime, I see it as just a very small form factor laptop which is lighter and thinner, but with decent speed sporting an i7 and a SSD makes it great for moderate to heavy usage.

It's definitely more of a luxury item than anything else, small form factor is just a nice to have, more than anything it's very much a non-apple variant of the Mac Air, which is a nice bit of kit but ultimately locked to apple.

 

[Blandge]

I don't see why a 2-in-1 can't be called an Ultrabook too.

Also, I don't know why so many people say that a touchscreen is useless on a laptop. I actually think it's really nice. It's much more natural that using a mouse for a lot of things, and a million times better than using a trackpad. A good combination of mouse + touchscreen makes for a very comfortable experience.

 

[Eug]

I agree to some extent. If I were paying the full retail on them ($600 IINM), I'd be unsatisfied. As it is, I'm quite happy with them (with two caveats : blew away Win8 and replaced it with Win7, swapped out the slim 5400rpm clunker with a 256GB SSD).

As far as the full-sized keyboard, you have to make some tradeoffs to get 11.6". Battery life isn't the greatest (~4.5 hours is the best I got), but sufficient. It's not as thin and light as a real MBA, but again, for <= 1/3 the price, good enough. With an SSD, I can cold boot and be launching Photoshop in < 15 seconds.

With my Acer (see sig), it has a full-sized keyboard, and it's 11.6". The 11.6" Air also has a full-sized keyboard.

However, mine is an older model so it only supports 3.5ish GB RAM and it has a slow CPU. Core 2 class, but just barely. I had to max out the RAM and put in an SSD just to get it to acceptable performance levels with Windows 7. Oh yeah and I also spend lots and lots of time removing all of the crapware. It's not as easy as it sounds. I removed one too many third party add-ons as it turns out, as one of them was the driver for the laptop-specific function keys. I had to search far and wide to find it to reinstall the driver. However, the battery life is very decent on mine, presumably because the CPU is slow and very low power - Pentium SU4100 with 10 Watt TDP.

That's much lower than the 17 Watt TDP for the Intel® Core&#8482; i3 3217U found in some of those Asus VivoBook 202E laptops.

However, like you, even though my screen quality is poor, I'm not complaining too much, because I paid under $400, years ago.

 

[BrightCandle]

Apple got one thing right more than anything else - cheap computers are rubbish and they diminish your brand, they do a good job of making getting reasonable hardware easy, because actually there are no cheap and rubbish mac books at all. Right now I would say Sony's 13" ultra book is better than an Air in almost every way, the screen is better, the performance is mostly better, the keyboard is better and the touchpads are equivalent. But Sony also has a bundle of cheaper and quite rubbish machines as well and that distracts the buyer into thinking Sony's machines overall are worse, which on average is definitely true.

There was this wonderful piece about sales tactics and experiments that a website did using A|B testing. They tried offering various versions of their online product and 2 clear segmentations made sense. But when they tried making up a third offering that was clearly not worth the extra price above the previous reasonable top offering more people bought the middle one (the previous top tier). If it was just the 2 offerings without the stupidly priced top one more people bought the bottom offer but once the third was there it didn't get any sales but the middle one suddenly did much better. Yet nothing else changed. It seriously impacted their income however.

There is quite a weird psychology around the number of different products you offer and how you segment them. If you have too many products at too many different price points then you end up framing your other products in a different light. Ultrabook's and other "top price" machines get piled into the too expensive bracket, yet there was a time when PC's were basically a £1000 and that was the entry level and it went up from there. The machines did get a bit cheaper over time but if you kept buying at that price point you find performance keeps getting better. I would argue its still about the right price point for a decent PC. The adding of the low end machines like the atoms changed our expectations of the price of a PC to make a new "mid price". But that doesn't mean that is actually what people should be buying. Realistically for a good experience people should be choosing between portable or faster at roughly the same price points. What they actually do is choose between cheapest and a bit more expensive and they end up with under performing and poor quality machines.

The race to the bottom in price has really hurt the overall perception of the PC, many people are not surprisingly disappointed with the lower end machines. Apple simply doesn't offer them, they already understand that margins are low there and its not really what people want. But if you can cut through the marketing Apple might be first but its no longer the best at that price point, but they sure make it easier to see their good hardware because they don't have the bad making it look expensive.

That is my opinion on why the perception is the way it is. Could be wrong of course.

 

[Eug]

I still find Apple laptops to be my favourite, because of the top to bottom integration with the OS, and I prefer OS X to Windows 7.

To give you a simple but illustrative example:

My iMac is my main machine, but I also have a MacBook Pro, that I only use on trips and occasionally at my workplace. I had to get the iMac repaired so what I did is just cloned the drive to an external USB drive (after backing everything up). Then I took the iMac in for repair. During that period I just put the MacBook Pro in its place, and booted off the external USB drive. Didn't skip a beat. When I got the iMac back, I recloned the USB drive back to the iMac.

 

[bryanW1995]

Ultrabooks may not be going anywhere in N.America, can't say because I'm not there, but here in Asia they are quite popular.

I've never been to Taipei, are you enjoying living there?

 

[dastral]

I'm not sure where you get this mythical 1400$ figure. I've seen TONS of ultrabooks for the 600-800$ mark in the past year.

Don't confuse "vivobook" "zenbook" "random_book" and "UltraBook" (TM) : A 11" or 13" Thin Laptop with good battery life is NOT an "UltraBook" (TM)

Here are the latest requirements from Wiki :
Processor : Haswell microarchitecture SiP (11.5 or 15 W TDP)
Height (maximum) : 23 mm baseline requirement
Battery life (minimum) : 6 hours HD video playback & 9 hours Windows 8 idle
Resume from hibernation (maximum) : 3 seconds
Storage : 80 MB/s transfer rate (minimum)
I/O : Intel Wireless Display Touchscreen
Software and firmware : Anti-virus, anti-malware, Intel Anti-Theft Technology, Intel Identity Protection Technology

So if you want to skip the touchscreen to save 50$ and put half of that money into a better LCD...
You're not an Ultrabook (TM) but i agree there are several good 600-800$ "light enduring laptops" out there

 

[seitur]

The average consumer is clueless and the main thing that decides are price and maybe the design. So most buy laptops with crappy 1366x768 TN panels, 5400 rpm disks and bad battery life which weight double than they actually should.

It is not about being clueless. Most people simply cannot afford to spend 1000$+ on a laptop. Simple as that.

That is why there is more 300-400$ laptops getting sold than 1000$ ones. That is why there is more 200$ smartphones or 100$ tablets getting sold than 500$+ devices.

That is also why you have more GTX 630 sold than Titans.

Because most people cannot afford expensive stuff.

Guess what? If nothing will change than will just get more and more noticeable. Because wealth diffrences are getting BIGGER, not smaller.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I know that it's not technically an "UltraBook", but my Acer Aspire One 722 (C-60, 4GB RAM, 120GB SSD - aftermarket) is a great little thin 'n light laptop.

It could have better screen res or a faster CPU, but I honestly don't have any need for a thinner form-factor, if that would mean things like sacrificing ports.

Edit: It's also easy to work on, and has a user-replaceable battery. Two things that I consider important.

Edit: This is my idea of a poor-man's "UltraBook":
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834314110

 

[erunion]

I don't see why a 2-in-1 can't be called an Ultrabook too.

They can be both.

 

[Fjodor2001]

To judge whether or not Ultrabooks should be a considered a failure, have they met the sales targets predicted by Intel?

 

[Idontcare]

To judge whether or not Ultrabooks should be a considered a failure, have they met the sales targets predicted by Intel?

That would be the recipe for judging whether or not the sale's and marketing team failed in adequately projecting product demand.

Failing to correctly size up the TAM potential is not the same as a product failing to capture the TAM potential. (both are real problems, but one must not conflate the two)

 

[Fjodor2001]

That would be the recipe for judging whether or not the sale's and marketing team failed in adequately projecting product demand.

Failing to correctly size up the TAM potential is not the same as a product failing to capture the TAM potential. (both are real problems, but one must not conflate the two)

I would say it's an indication of whether or not Ultrabooks are a failure in the light of the expectations Intel originally had on them in terms of sales. What the reason is that they have failed to sell as well as Intel hoped, that's something that can have multiple explanations.

 

[frozentundra123456]

That would be the recipe for judging whether or not the sale's and marketing team failed in adequately projecting product demand.

Failing to correctly size up the TAM potential is not the same as a product failing to capture the TAM potential. (both are real problems, but one must not conflate the two)

I agree basically. Calling them a "failure" is too general. For sure I wouldn't say they are a technical failure. They fulfill their function and are being improved with each generation. Sales wise they haven't met expectations, but they are still being sold, so I don't know if that constitutes a "failure" or not. Calling something a failure is just basically a meaningless label unless you specify what you mean by the term.

 

[mrmt]

O

I would say it's an indication of whether or not Ultrabooks are a failure in the light of the expectations Intel originally had on them in terms of sales. What the reason is that they have failed to sell as well as Intel hoped, that's something that can have multiple explanations.

OK, let's assume that ultrabooks are a failure. Do we know why?

Did Intel get wrong sales forecasts?
Did the consumer shun the product?
Didn't Intel chips live up to the task?
Did the supply chain fail to generate products within the targeted MRSP?
Did OEMs fail in getting cool products out of the door?
Did windows fail in being a good touch OS? (I cannot stand win8 in a tablet)
Did the lack of killer applications impair the adoption?
All of the above?

I cannot really say. Charlie simply does not it like the form factor because he would happily trade more weight for less price and more USB ports. That's the tune of his criticism to both NUC and ultrabook. But if that criticism was correct we would see growth in the cheap PC market or in AMD share, and this is not what is happening.

I tend to see the things more like a Microsoft failure. I just bought my first Apple because I cannot stand W8 in a touch screen. It's a Frankenstein, a OS designed by a committee of opposing factions inside the company and not by a lead architect with a vision. The lack of a killer app for it just add insult to the injury.

Until people feel they actually need an ultrabook, they won't sell. And there is no amount of form factor engineering that can make up for the lackluster W8 and its Frankenstein interface.