Courtesy of Benzinga.
Ultrabooks were expected to account for 40 percent of all notebook shipments in 2012. After failing to achieve that goal, players within the industry expect to have much greater success in the new year.
According to DigiTimes, the third-generation Ultrabook platform (codenamed Haswell) is scheduled to ship at the end of the second quarter. Haswell is reportedly cheaper than Ivy Bridge. The platform also promises to deliver stronger performance. This could allow manufacturers to produce cheaper and more powerful Ultrabooks that succeed in attracting the masses.
Up until now, Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) MacBook Air has proven to be the most successful notebook of its kind. Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) launched the Ultrabook initiative with the goal of leading the PC market. The irony is that Intel processors also appear in the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac Mini and Mac Pro.
Intel has been struggling ever since it unveiled the Ultrabook concept at the end of May 2011. Since that time, shares of Intel have declined by more than 10 percent.
The chip maker had hoped that it could overcome Apple’s dominance by investing $300 million in new technology, but that initiative has currently failed. According to DigiTimes, Ultrabooks accounted for just 10 percent of total notebook shipments in 2012.
Last month Bloomberg reported that Apple is “exploring ways to replace Intel Corp. processors in its Mac personal computers with a version of the chip technology it uses in the iPhone and iPad.” None of those chips are currently powerful enough to replace a high-end processor from Intel or some other manufacturer. Apple, which began developing its own chips a few years ago, hopes to change that in the near future.
Bloomberg speculated that Apple CEO Tim Cook may want to offer consumers a “seamless experience” across all devices by 2017. By using a similar chip architecture in all of the company’s products (Macs, iPhones, iPads and iPods), this goal could be a little easier to attain.
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