Why Ultrabook Laptops Aren’t Just MacBook Air Clones

PC World’s Melanie Pinola notes that PC Ultrabooks are sleek, super-thin laptops that often feature a silver, wedge or tapering design – just like the Apple MacBook Air. However, she contends that despite Ultrabooks’ design similarities with Apple’s ultraportable, Ultrabooks really are a unique new breed of Windows laptops, offering a distinct combination of performance, good looks, and features – some of which not available on the MacBook Air.

Nor are they necessarily copycats. Pinola observes that in 2003 – five years before Apple introduced the MacBook Air – Sony released a premium, super-thin, 1.8-pound laptop, The Vaio X505, whose enclosure tapered down to 0.4 inches at the front (thinner than the Air) and had the sleek metallic body found on Ultrabooks today. She also notes that the Envy Spectre XT, for example, has a magnesium body with a brushed design and a rubber bottom coating, while the Air uses aluminum with no pattern or bottom coating, and while even though Ultrabooks do look exactly like the MacBook Air, often there are significant differences inside. Besides running Windows, using Intel processors, and meeting the thinness requirement, laptop makers are free to adapt Intel’s specifications for Ultrabooks as they see fit.

Some Ultrabooks push the dimensions of Ultrabooks with larger displays, and Ultrabooks tend to offer more I/O ports and expansion headroom and flexibility than the MacBook Air does, with options for both SSD and hybrid HDD drives, the hybrid alternative increasing storage capacity in exchange for a bit of a performance hit, and some models offer discrete Nvidia graphics cards.

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