iHS, owner of iSuppli seems to find it funny that they’ve had to slash their estimations for Ultrabook sales by 50%. “Dude, You’re Not Getting an Ultrabook” does a great job at getting the media to echo the story but did iHS cock-up or did the market change dramatically in the last few months? We’re a month away from Windows 8, prices have dropped considerably and the Ultrabook looks well-positioned to take a large percentage of the laptop sales market in Q4. Was the back-to-school period disappointing or is the laptop market overall going to suffer in Q4 and take Ultrabooks with it? This is no laughing matter.

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If you want a laugh at a spin on some good news this morning, read the story that Apples share of the Ultrabook market will fall. When you own nearly 100% of the market and you get your first competitors, the only way to go is down. the good news is that sales numbers, the important figures, will rise.

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Despite Acer’s bullish proposals for an updated S3 ultrabook in April next year it looks like new Ultrabooks won’t start hitting shelves until the second half of 2012 but when they do, we can expect CPU and GPU clock boosts along with the extra goodness that’s going into the chipsets.

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Fujitsu may have launched the SH771 high-end ultra-light but that doesn’t mean they aren’t going to produce an Ultrabook. How do we know? We have pics of Fujitsu Ultrabooks!

Sent to us from Mr Blurrycam himself and marked-up with equally fuzzy information, these pics are supposed to have been shown in a private event recently and were highlighted as Ultrabooks for the 2012 market.

There’s two models being shown here. One is an almost ready 13”er, the other, just a plastic prototype of an 11” Ultrabook which leads us to believe that we’re looking at a Sandy Bridge model and a slightly thinner Ivy Bridge device here.

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With an estimated notebook ship volume of 5.4 million units forecast for Q3 2011, top-3 notebook manufacturer Acer is hoping that Ultrabooks will make up 30% of volumes in 2012. That’s something in the region of 6 million unit for the year.

The news comes from Taiwan News who’s article makes an interesting read. Read this section from the ‘half-full’ angle and then again from the ‘half empty’ angle.

"In our survey of 200 local consumers, we found that 77 percent are interested in an ultra-thin notebook PC, with 49 percent of them saying they will switch to the new product within six months,"

Experience tells me that people are happy to say ‘yes I will’ before there’s a chance to buy or a known price. The $1000 price point could change opinion very quickly. Even if Acer leads in price, they will have to cut across huge sections of their own market in just 12 months. Interestingly, Acer also state that they won’t be doing an 11” model because it competes with low-cost devices. They’re probably referring to netbooks with Acer possibly believing that millions of 10 and 11” netbook owners could be tempted to upgrade. Bigger is better, right?

In the current market climate where low-cost tablets are potentially attracting users away from notebook and desktop upgrades and major manufacturers are offering basic ‘almost ultrabooks’ for a much lower price, the 30% figure is going to be a huge challenge.

Full article from Taiwan News here.