Stakes High For Intel’s Ultrabook Strategy As PC Laptop Makers Struggle To Keep Up With MacBook Air – The ‘Book Mystique
Windows PC laptop manufacturers are struggling to compete with Apple’s MacBook Air, which has ascended in popularity since completely redesigned 11″ and 13″ models were released October, 2010, and with the mid-2011 revision, which added Intel Core “i” Sandy Bridge processors and the ultra-fast Thunderbolt I/O interface, plus restoration of backlit keyboards, proving to be the must-have laptop of the year — deemed “perfect” by some reviewers (see: http://bit.ly/nNJrGG and http://bit.ly/rlKkZ5 for example).
PCWorld’s Jason Cross notes that for every laptop manufacturer not named Apple, the race is now on to make new super-thin and super-light laptops, a class that Intel is calling Ultrabooks, but that previous efforts to market this class of laptop, such as Sony’s razor-thin, sub two-pound X505 in 2003, and Dell’s Adamo and even thinner Adamo XPS in 2009, failed in the marketplace, while Apple hit the sweet spot with the revised MacBook Air last fall and has gone from strength to strength.
Cross thinks the main problem for Apple’s PC competitors in creating “must-have” products is philosophical and conceptual, noting that they tend to proceed conservatively and cautiously, with product planning and development predicated on market research — ie: what customers tell them they want. By contrast Apple routinely ranges outside the envelope to create products that people didn’t know they wanted, but find that they don’t want to live without once they see them.
As Steve Jobs has been cited musing: “If the Mac company were a separate company, and the iPad company were a separate company, what would the Mac company build to compete with the iPad? And I think the answer is the MacBook Air.” Ergo, synergy among the various Apple product development teams is complimentary rather than zero-sum competitive, which I suppose could be said of Apple’s vertical integration philosophy dating back to the company’s decision back in the 1980s to create a closed system with hardware and software development under one roof, a strategy that has been key to facilitating the elegantly smooth “it just works” performance that Macs, and more recently Apple’s other hardware devices, have long been noted for (mostly) delivering.
A more practical problem for the PC makers, Jason Cross observes, is that Apple has contractually monopolized all the lathes capable of carving laptop enclosures out of single blocks of metal to create the unibody aluminum chassis that makes MacBooks satisfyingly and reassuringly rigid despite their thin design, obliging competitors to look to alternate materials and engineering techniques that have not thus far rendered comparable characteristics.
Last Friday, Digitimes’ Aaron Lee and Joseph Tsai reported that notebook chassis maker Catcher projects that it will be running at full capacity at least through to year-end 2011 due to strong demand for the magnesium-aluminum alloy chassis it builds for notebook manufacturers, and indeed is planning boost its capacity by 20% in the second half of the year, thanks largely to the success of Apple’s MacBook Air boosting demand for the metal enclosures, which the company had anticipated would contribute more than 50% of its revenues in 2011, but with demand growing in the second half of 2011, the revised estimate is now 55-60% with Catcher’s notebook business up 30% on year. Sources at Catcher told Digitimes that while the penetration rate of metal chassis in the notebook industry has typically been around 30-40%, with Apple’s MacBook Air boosting demand for metal chassis, and Intel aggressively pushing its Ultrabook concept, the penetration rate could surpass 40% in 2012.
PCWorld’s Cross predicts that Ultrabooks coming this fall such as the Asus UX51 and the Acer Aspire 3951 will be “too late,” and that even if they’re priced low enough to manage to sell reasonably well, they’ll still suffer being labeled also-rans — MacBook Air wannabes and lookalikes, and that by the time PC manufacturers figure out how to make a cheaper laptop that is as thin, light, and long-lived as a MacBook Air, everyone will be drooling over whatever new MacBook Apple will have just introduced.
Writing for Forbes, Endpoint Technologies Associates, Inc.’s Roger Kay notes that last week Intel accelerated Ultrabook promotion, with its specs and characteristics for the category being quite precise in some cases and generously vague in others, stipulating that Ultrabooks must be less than 21mm (0.83) thick, use low-voltage Core processors, cost less than $1,000, sustain at least five hours of battery life, and employ Intel’s Rapid Start technology which allows nearly instant power-on by means of embedded flash memory.
Not required,, but recommended, are solid state drives (SSDs), and touch technology will likely be incorporated in later Ultrabook versions Kay predicts. Thunderbolt I/O interface technology, nominally 22 times faster than USB 2.0, and already shipping use in all Apple notebooks and some Apple desktops, may also become part of the Ultrabook package in the future, he says. The first Ultrabook iteration is to be based on 32nm Sandy Bridge processors with systems powered by these chips reaching markets in time for the holidays, according to an Intel announcement last week (http://intel.ly/qlG99h).
Intel says the second phase of its Ultrabook vision will be centered around the next-generation Intel processor family codenamed Ivy Bridge, which is scheduled for availability in systems in the first half of 2012. Laptops based on Ivy Bridge will bring improved power efficiency, smart visual performance, increased responsiveness and enhanced security, being based on Sandy Bridge’s microarchitecture but in 22nm silicon and built on 3D transistors.
Ultrabook phase three in 2013 is projected to be powered by another new generation of Intel Core chips, codenamed Haswell, also 22nm, but with an entirely new microarchitecture that is expected to reduce power consumption to half of the thermal design point for today’s Intel microprocessors.
In his Forbes piece, Kay reviews the not-encouraging history of thin and light subnotebook PC computers, and observes that there’s an enormous amount at stake for Intel in promoting mindshare for x86 architecture in the high mobility space, noting that Apple, which has already effectively colonized the category with its MacBook Air, could easily switch its subnotebooks over to its own in-house developed ARM-based processor silicon “at any moment.” [especially after the quad-core Apple A6 ARM chip becomes available sometime in 2012. See: http://cens.com/cens/html/en/news/news_inner_37282.html – CM.] Consequently, says Kay, Intel needs to make a definitive statement in the high mobility arena and the Ultrabook is its chosen vehicle for doing that. Whether that statement will succeed where Windows PC makers have failed spectacularly in the past is another matter.
For more information on Intel’s Ultrabook program, visit:
http://intel.ly/qlG99h