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WHAT DO MOST children want this Christmas? If you are thinking a Lego set or an Angry Birds stuffed toy, sorry, that is not it. What they really want is an iPad, says a Nielsen survey. Apple Inc’s touchscreen tablet is the musthave toy for 44% of children aged six to 12 years old in the US.
It’s also the must-have toy for many grown-ups this holiday season. And while that is great news for Apple and the original equipment manufacturers along its supply chain, it is glum news for at least two product segments of the PC market. The first is notebooks, where demand has been crimped not just by media tablets but also by folks tightening their belts during the gift-buying season.
The second is netbooks. These low-priced mini versions of notebooks took off during the downturn of 2008/09 but have since been eclipsed by tablets, which have shaken up the world of mobile computing with their high entertainment value. Netbooks have fallen so out of favour that demand could shrink by 40 million units next year, warns Taiwan’s Market Intelligence Center, a government- funded think tank.
That has spurred PC makers to reinvent their mobile computing devices. And the upshot of that is the ultrabook. Backed heavily by Intel, whose chips have been shut out of the tablet market, the ultrabook is a notebook that has gone through a crash diet. It is thinner and lighter than ever, yet can do what a full fledged computer does, not just play videos or give quick web access.
To meet Intel’s ultrabook trademark, the current generation of these devices has to weigh less than 1.4kg and be thinner than 20mm. They should also have a battery life of more than five hours while the reload time from sleep mode should be super fast, just seconds. Lastly, they should be priced below US$1,000 ($1,296).
Of course, there has long been an ultrabook in the market — the Mac- Book Air. In fact, the new ultrabooks that have just come out in Taiwan, such as Asustek Computer’s Zenbook and Acer Inc’s Aspire S3, look and feel remarkably like the sleek and elegant MacBook Air. Fitted with solid state drives, they power up quickly and have a resume time from hibernation of a few seconds, making them more like iPads.
Lighter and faster is definitely the way forward in the evolution of the notebook, and Intel bravely predicts that ultrabooks will make up 40% of worldwide notebook demand by the end of next year. However, many in the industry, and even first movers in this new space such as Taiwanese PC maker Asustek, recognise that Intel’s goal is ambitious.
