Ultrabooks vs Tablets: Predictions Of Tablet Rout Premature, But….

The Register’s Tony Smith riffs on widspread commentary, mostly sourced from the same DigiTimes article, predicting that tablet sales will be hammered next year by Ultrabooks.

That prognostication is primarily attributed by Acer VP Scott Lin, hardly a disinterested and unbiased observer being as Acer’s Aspire S3 Ultrabook ws released in Taiwan the day before the Digitimes article appeared.

Lin suggests (reasonably) that Ultrabooks won’t start to hit their stride until early next year. Smith notes that Intel has announced that second-gen Ultrabooks based in its new ‘Ivy Bridge’ CPU family will be available then offering better performance and battery life than first-gen models, and that Lin anticipates Ultrabooks accounting for 30 percent of global notebook sales by the end of 2012, mirroring Intel’s projections. However, he also believes Ultrabooks will eat into tablet sales, which Smith agrees that they may very well do, but observes that Acer has an interest in promoting that view, what with the drubbing that Apple’s iPad has laid on it and rival PC makers.

I’m a laptop fan and tablet skeptic (albeit iPad 2 user), and would welcome a resurgence in laptop popularity, whether or not at the expense of the tablet market, and I wish the Ultrabook platform well along with Apple’s MacBooks of course. However, I don’t perceive a whole lot of evidence so far supporting the premise that laptops are going to regain a lot of ground given up so far to the touchscreen computer, although reports that Apple has cut iPad 2 orders, and the disasters HP and RIM have suffered in their tablet PC ventures could be early leading indicators.

However, it’s not a zero-sum game, and increased demand for skinny laptops doesn’t necessarily mean demand for tablets will fall in lockstep. Tablets have their place as content consumption devices, but they’re no satisfactory replacement for laptops for content creators and power users. Windows 8 may change that, but it’s a year or so away.