What a depressing, and somewhat embarrassing set of news items we’ve seen for Ultrabooks on the Web this week.

You may have noticed that there hasn’t been much interesting Ultrabook news this week and as we hit summer holidays, silly season starts. Stick with Ultrabooknews for a more sensible take on whats’ going on because journalists, no, juniors employed to cover summer holidays are fed with news items and hints and it usually ends up looking cheap.

“Hey, IDG published a report on the PC market. There’s a few mentions of Ultrabooks in it and it looks bad. Send some provocative copy to the editor because page views are down.” Junior writer ends up with pieces that get edited to this, this and this.

Fact 1 – There are no Ultrabook sales numbers available, only best guesses.

Fact 2 – Ultrabook sales started in June – the last month in Q2.

Where does Fact 2 come from? Us. We’ve got more too…

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Following our report that ASUS will be updating the UX Zenbook series and are tentatively planning a launch in May we now have an official statement that new ASUS Ultrabooks will indeed come in May. Prices will be attractive too.

At an investor conference Executive Officer Jerry Shen said there would be ‘a number’ of new models to cover each price segment with price possible starting at US$699

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Intel says 40%, Merril Lynch say 7%.

These two figures represent the highest and lowest numbers I’ve seen so far for 2012 Ultrabook sales. 40% was always a tough number to swallow but 7%, that’s 15m sales, sounds a bit low. Netbooks are predicted to sell 20m this year and with prices on new Ultrabooks targeting $699 in Q3, you could see quite the rush on Q4 sales.

“Ultrabook pricing will need to be lowered to about US$750 to gain broader acceptance, and vendors may be able to move closer to the target in 2012 by finding cost savings in the unit’s CPU, storage and casing, the bank said. ”

Reports yesterday showed that Acer, usually one of the price-beaters, was ready to focus on the $699-$799 market in Q3 this year.

Merril Lynch also estimates 50m sales in 2013.

In a previous report (Sept 2011 that is available here as a PDF) Merril Lynch said that a $600 price point would cover 50% of the price-band that laptops cover. That’s a 120 million unit ‘addressable market’ opportunity in 2013.

Not that we mind really. As long as there are good-value, good quality choices in the thin,light and productive laptop category we’re happy!

Ultrabooks forecast to make up 20% of notebook sales in 2013 – CNA ENGLISH NEWS.

No source is quoted, or has been found for this article.

Acer’s Jim Wong has told media in Taiwan that Ultrabooks are on track and prices will fall, potentially to $499 in 2013.

Acer had planned to ship, that’s ship, 250000 to 300000 units of the Acer Aspire S3 this year and expect to achieve that target. It’s a slightly veiled shout of confidence to the media but even shipping a third of a million devices requires a lot of risk-taking and investment.

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