Ultrabook Manufacturers Limiting Initial Shipments in Face of MacBook Air Popularity
Top to bottom: MacBook Air, ASUS UX21, Toshiba Portege Z830, Acer Aspire S3, Lenovo IdeaPad U300s (Source: This is my next...) Apple's redesigned MacBook Air has proven popular with consumers, with the company reportedly pushing out
up to 500,000 units per month to satisfy demand. The product's success has drawn the interest of Intel and Windows PC manufacturers, who are beginning to roll out their own "Ultrabook" models to compete with the MacBook Air. But a
new report from
Digitimes claims that those manufacturers are merely testing the waters, limiting initial shipments to a combined 50,000 units.
First-tier notebook brand vendors Acer, Lenovo, Toshiba and Asustek Computer, understanding that demand for notebooks is unlikely to recover in the fourth quarter, while Apple's products are taking up all the glory in the market, will limit their initial Ultrabook shipment volume to below 50,000 units for testing the water, according to sources from notebook makers.
Intel has been pushing the Ultrabook concept as the future of notebook computers, but manufacturers have been having difficulties bringing costs to the point where they can compete with the MacBook Air. Intel has been pushing for Ultrabook pricing to begin at under $1000, and while some models may reach that goal, manufacturers and Intel have been at odds over how to cut costs to reach that target.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
Top Rated Comments
That's what these companies do now. They just look at Apple and make cheap knock-offs, and then wonder why nobody is impressed by their offerings. It's almost sad to watch. Some of these OEMs had really impressive products, but now they all seem like junk that cannot resonate or generate even the slightest excitement.
That image is incredible. The windows machines are so UGLY. That picture should send all of the PC guys back to the drawing board, and win a nice pat on the back for the design team at Apple.
If I wanted a Windows ultra book, I'd still buy the air, and just install Windows.