Intel came up with the Ultrabook category in hopes of blowing Apple's MacBook Air out of the water. Ultrabooks are supposed to be thin and light. They're intended to be powerful and well equipped with features. And they must be aesthetically pleasing, or at least that's Intel's vision for the Ultrabook category. And so far, Ultrabooks are all of these things, so why aren't they selling?
Politics makes for strange bedfellows, and so does competition in PC platforms, This helps explain why Acer chairman JT Wang is in full support of Hewlett Packard keeping its PC business rather than spinning it off or selling it to a third party. Wondering what that has to do with Acer? It's simple, really -- HP is the world's largest PC manufacturer, and both have a common enemy in Apple.
GameStop is the place you go to for used game trade-ins, new titles, new and used hardware, accessories, and things of the sort, most of which are related to consoles (save for a sad one-sided rack of PC games). But would you buy a $400 or $500 Android tablet at GameStop? The brick-and-mortar chain is going to try to sell you one this coming holiday shopping season, with free games added to sweeten the pot.
As hard drive component suppliers struggle to recover from recent flooding in Thailand, Acer revealed during an investor conference that it has no choice but to charge more for its products. Acer sees little to no alternatives when the cost of hard disk drives spikes by as much as 20 percent, costs that are ultimately passed on to the consumer.
Those of you rocking and rolling over in Europe have six new LED monitors to choose from today, all from Acer and all sporting slim profiles that measure just 13mm (barely more than half an inch, for the anti metric system crowd). These are TN panels ranging in size from 19 inches to 24 inches with contrast ratios of up to 100,000,000:1 (dynamic, of course).
Acer just put all other OEMs on notice by announcing the U.S. availability of its first Ultrabook, the Aspire S3-951. By tagging the S3 with an $899 price tag, Acer made it impossible for other OEMs to claim you can't build a sub-$1,000 Ultrabook at current component pricing. Not only did Acer do that by more than a hundred bucks, it also managed to cram both a solid state drive and mechanical hard drive in there for that price.
The Microsoft patent juggernaut keeps on rolling. As you all know, Microsoft has managed to force yet another bright star in the Android firmament to sign a patent licensing deal with it. Redmond’s patent deal with Samsung, which requires that the latter pay royalties to MS for every Android device it sells, hasn’t gone down too well with archrival Google. The search engine giant on Wednesday called the Windows developer on the carpet for its tactics.
Intel's vision of a perfect world is one in which Ultrabooks never breach the $1,000 mark. Actually, Intel's utopia involves ARM and AMD running off together and leaving the microprocessor market behind, as unrealistic as that might sound. What's not unrealistic is the idea of sub-$1,000 Ultrabooks, and Acer is proving as much with its $899 Aspire S.
Don't point the finger at Acer or Asus if Intel's Ultrabook initiative fails to gain traction. These are the same two companies largely responsible for popularizing netbooks a few years ago, and now the two are turning their attention to the Ultrabook category. Both companies will look to ship 200,000 Ultrabooks a month in the fourth quarter.
Lenovo stopped just shy of declaring war on Dell in a recent public 
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