Yesterday at Apple’s annual developer conference, WWDC, the company revealed a refreshed version of the MacBook Air, the company’s thin-and-light Ultrabook competitor. Both 11-inch and 13-inch versions are getting Intel’s latest Haswell chips. Apple claims 9 hours of battery life for the 11-inch Air and 12 hours for the 13-inch. While critics have called Ultrabooks ‘MacBook Air Clones’, Apple may be falling behind.
With talk about the potential dilution of the Ultrabook brand one would almost think that Intel hasn’t set clear guidelines about what defines an Ultrabook. On the contrary, whether or not a laptop manufacturer calls a new product an Ultrabook tells me a whole lot about the product right away. PC Advisor has run a story claiming that “The truth is that there are few definitive specifications for an Ultrabook,” apparently not realizing that this is part of the strategy.
ASUS could be in trouble with those Zenbooks. LG with the Xnote. The Acer S7, Gigabyte X11, Dell XPS and others could be at risk too because Apple just secured a patent on a wedge design.
A few weeks ago I wrote down what I thought was the most likely timeline for 2nd-gen Ultrabooks, just a few days before a leak pointed at a June 5th launch.
Taking the new information into account I’ve updated the timeline for Ultrabook activities. If I get more information I’ll update again. Again, the timeline is my estimation based on information and experience and I’m publishing it to help those that are making plans to buy both 1st and 2nd-gen Ultrabooks in the Q3-Q4 2012 timeframe.
Apple now have a series of patents for the MacBook Air ‘ornamental design’ and we’re wondering just how much this could impact Ultrabook design in the future. When you see approvals for layouts such as the one below, you have to wonder!
Yes, you’re looking at a featureless rectangle that was approved two days ago as Patent US D654072.
The last week has been pretty poor in terms of Ultrabook news. There’s been some discussion about sales numbers and prices (again!), some discussion about the MacBook Air (again) and some discussion about the Transformer Prime as it relates to Ultrabooks (e.g. here and here. Update: Similar here.) I saw a major online PC magazine pump out a raft of generic Ultrabook articles for Google to trawl and to top it off, Lenovo said they couldn’t send us a U300s for testing. Thank goodness Daniel sent us his U300s owner review!
Yesterday’s top Ultrabook theme was the Intel ‘Pop-Up Theater’ Ultrabook video which I thought was cute, but a little weak. Done in the ‘flashmob’ style it felt a like a poor attempt at a viral campaign that copies too much from other set-ups we’ve seen before. It was obviously heavily edited and didn’t really tell anyone about what the Ultrabook was. The Popup Theatre website has 233 tweets and 469 Facebook likes as I write which will grow over time but seems middle-of-the-road; echoing the production.
It looks like this article from The Verge is more of a ‘must comment’ than a ‘must read’ but I encourage you to do both. Fellow tech blogger Joanna Stern has published a review of the MacBook Air running Windows.
If any of you are still here after seeing the link, go back and read some of the comments. There’s a huge, and sometimes over-excited, comments section. One thing is for sure, the Ultrabook sector is clearly a HOT topic.
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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