Laptop manufacturer’s has a fear that their Ultrabook will not sell since there is the Macbook, which dominates the market. A rumor arises that Acer, Asus, Lenovo and Toshiba are all making initial shipments that are fewer than 50,000 units. They all want to wait for what would happen on the initial approach as they do not want to lose a large sum of money.
By comparison, Asus in May shipped 100,000 Eee Pad Transformer tablets, goes beyond by more than 200,000 in June, based on the Netbook News.
Intel, in May, announced their plans in recharging the PC market with a brand new laptop type called ultrabooks, which features longer battery life, ultrathin profiles of 0.8 inches or smaller and price are less than $1000. The new ultra portable laptops supposedly to merge the performance capabilities of laptops with “tablet-like features such as instant-on functionality”. The first batches of ultrabooks due to come out this fall. By 2012 and 2013, even more advanced devices are going to come out.
Six months ago before before Intel proclaimed that there is an ultrabook category, Apple was making a sizeable name for MacBook Air. The new Apple laptop is almost the same as what Intel wants to see in ultrabooks such as solid-state hard drives, instant-on functionality, full-size keyboards, and at least one model that cost less than $1000. The current MacBook Air refresh in July is going to feature Sandy Bridge Core i5 and i7 processors, more RAM.
Apple does not give the full details about their sales last month, so none knew how well Air is doing, but industry watchers think that the laptop is among the most popular models in Apple’s stable. Market research Company NPD Group in August asserted that the MacBook Air refresh, and the introduction of OS X Lion has led to an increased in sales by up 26 percent compared on the previous sale the last time. Then in March, an analyst with Concord Securities anticipated that Apple delivered more than one million MacBook Airs on dates between October and December 2010.
Apple manages to tap the needs of people for the smaller, and lighter laptops, without sacrificing the need for processing speed or responsiveness. If PC makers can come up with similar devices that operates on Windows and priced below Apple’s Air lineup ($1000-$1600), there’s no cause for ultrabooks to compete.
However, it is not clear how the laptops maker gets excited over the fact that there is now a new device category.