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Intel Details New Ultrabook Reference Designs
MojoKid writes "Earlier this year, Intel unveiled its plan to redefine the concept of a PC around an ultra thin-and-light chassis reminiscent of the Macbook Air and with a standard CPU TDP of just 15W. Intel has unveiled the reference specs for ultra-notebook products they're calling 'Ultrabooks.' The cheaper ultra-notebook model will be 21mm thick with a BOM (bill of materials) between $475-650. A second, thinner model (18mm thick) will have a BOM between $493-710. Unlike netbooks, Ultrabooks will target the full range of consumer notebooks with screen sizes ranging from 11-17 inches. Reports are surfacing that the new systems will eschew the use of module-based components in favor of directly soldering certain components to the motherboard. Other findings indicated that Intel and its partners have researched alternatives to an aluminum-based chassis with materials like fiberglass expected to dominate the segment."
uhh
laptops?
What exactly is "standard CPU TDP"? My 4+ year or thinkpad T61 has a (total, not just CPU) TDP of about 15W during light use.
This is probably the gayest description of something called an "ultrabook" there is nothing special about it.....
So... to help filter past the marketing filters:
laptop - dvd drive = netbook
netbook - plastic case + fiberglass case = ultrabook
"general public" who ignore the marketing materials, like my wife and sister in law, continue to refer to any clamshell design with a keyboard as a "laptop".
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Atom sales have fallen off sharply in the past year, thanks to a recovering economy
Erm... whose economy are we taking about here?
"New generation of products improve upon the old generation!"
And this story isn't even that good.
"Company A's next generation of products get close to being like Company B's products!"
Hm ?/
If it won't then it don't matter !!
Hm !!
GO with the LEADER !! Go with APPLE !! You can't go wrong by choosing APPLE !!
Status-quo for PCs as of lately - the entire lazy uninspiring market just trails Apple, who, as much as I dislike the whole flashy iDesign, have been the only true innovators for years now.
As much as I like my Thinkpad, it often amazes me why if it's thin and light, has everything you need, then it has to run that iOS thing.
It looks like Apple are thinking, while everyone else just tries to profit riding the wave. Like rich estate owners who cannot be bothered to actually work anymore, because it's been so long they did, they have no understanding nor desire to do so, but they do want the money they lay claim to.
We are sold "business" laptops that are supposed to be our road warriors, that have gamer graphics cards in them for some idiotic reason, that get not just warm but burning hot in our laps (while we thought we could actually use them as well LAPtops you know), that come with a shitload of software crap someone either thinks we need or doesn't give a damn about, and on top we have Microsoft aggressively pushing Windows to us, which is at best a patch on a suit full of holes and stains. My point is: the PC industry as a whole is a mess, there is no direction and definitely no respect for the multititude of jobs people who work with computers these days do - it's like we are sold toys that we are supposed to use and throw out after a year. Everybody sings their tune, software is pushed to interpreted languages and the cloud which negatively affect one of the most important usability factors out there - latency. It's amazing we are not told that we shouldn't multitask because the new JavaScript OS is too slow to do that on todays Intel Core CPU.
All the while Apple at least is innovating. Maybe because that's what they long wanted to get away from - the messy juggernaut of the PC industry that is like a landfill of throwouts someone somewhere tries to fit together to give us the next best thing, for their 15 minutes of fame.
Gee, Intel, is it a coincidence you thought of finally shaving off a centimeter off the average laptop height 2 years after Apple, and probably half a decade after it began to be possible and the users began wanting it really badly after complaining of carrying five pounds of machine on average with them every working day?
Ah, how beautiful it is to observe market space competition, falling prices relative to dollars, (which are also falling BTW.). Just how much would all and any of this cost to the end consumer if there was no inflation caused by government money printing? How much electronics would cost today without any government regulations, taxes, subsidies altogether I wonder? 100 bucks for a fully loaded top quality laptop? One can only dream of a world where there is more competition in everything else, from healthcare, to education, to insurance, to travel, to energy, to food, etc.etc. arrrgh.
You can't handle the truth.
Dude, the early 20th century called, they want their rotten ideologies back.
Fiberglass cases ? Double-punishment if you drop your "Ultrabook":
- Fiberglass breaks easily;
- If will spread a fine cloud of fiberglass shards after the impact - breathe those and your lungs are fubar.
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Sorry to see this new form factor requires lots of pieces built into place instead of modulized or componentized. It means when your SSD goes bad or the network card fries you will have to replace the whole thing, or at least send it in to the manufacturer for replacement. The days of replacing the card or the drive are over. More potential avenues for profit for the manufacturer, but not so good for us measly consumers!
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
I really wish you all the communism in the world, sincerely do. Proto-criminals like you deserve it. Just don't drag us along.
Speaking as a Mac owner, it's not so much a matter of "innovating" as it is having a different sense of what a laptop is.
Most PC manufacturers don't make phones (and none of them make anywhere near as many phones as Apple does) so their vision of "Laptop" is "just like a desktop, only with a battery, and light enough that you can carry them around." So this is what they make, and they do a good job of it.
The MacBook Air is not a mobile iMac or Mac Pro. These days, Apple's laptops are a bridge halfway between desktops and iPhones. They make use of Apple's sweetheart Flash supplier contracts to create a custom SSD form factor and keep things small. And Apple's phone experience, combined with control over the OS and use of EFI lets it implement power management better than any PC vendor can using off-the-shelf Windows and BIOS.
Compared to a netbook, I can see following negatives at once: - A BOM that is twice (at least) of the one of a netbook; - Components soldered in place, so no upgrades and if one fries, you have to buy a whole new system; with the higher BOM, you're doubly screwed; - Fiberglass casing, so it breaks easily, and releases shards that ruin lungs; Positives: - Possible decent screen (11/12") in a small form factor; - Thinner. So, the only way I see to get this to sell is to discontinue netbooks... Not that it has almost happened, with the disappearance of Linux netbooks, and of SSD based ones; but now AMD is also in the game, and can sell netbook plaforms, so how can intel push this platform and discontinue Atom/netbooks?
Someone doesn't know history. Until a few years ago, Tadpole was making laptop versions of Sun workstations. They had Sparc processors in them, not x86. The concept was good, but the implementation was poor: they had rather crappy 1024x768 LCDs, lousy keyboards, and nonexistant battery life. It could have been a good product, but it was inexcusable to have those limitations in a $10k laptop.
I need a few hundred gigs of disk space on a laptop. That'll still require a harddrive. Does that mean I can't use an Ultrabook ?
Think I'll pass on this
Dummy! Only metals can have alloys. Fiberglass is entirely made up of non-metals.
so it takes 700 bucks to gather the materials, add in marketing, management, packaging, wholesale, retail + extended warranty and your going to have a total shit 3000$ laptop that wont be able to do anything cause its only burning off 15 watts out of a celphone battery
sounds fucking great
Funny, a spec to clon a MacBook Air. I think the PCs will cost the same as a Mac. But for 999$ the MBA will look far better.
You know what would be an "ultra" book to me? A notebook using premium parts and the highest power/formfactor ratio around, that uses hardware compatible with Linux, ideally through documented firmware, open source firmware/drivers etc. The vast majority of laptops today, despite the upswing in laptop viability and explosion of the market (The idea of a moderately powered laptop under $3000 is easily attainable), seem to be designed extremely poorly, to "lowest common denominator" standards. Who are they designed for? Nearly all of the $1000+ and $2000+ niche offerings, clearly preferred by discriminating clientele with particular tastes, all seem to lack at least one "common sense" feature.
Take for instance "desktop replacements" and"gaming laptops". They're heavy, they're relatively powerful. Most of them are Clevo rebrands, or upjumped consumer crap like today's Alienware. However, they almost always have exactly zero "amenities". You've got an 8lb, 2inch thick monstrosity, but its only built out of of cheap plastic? You couldn't fit a backlit keyboard in there? You have the unmitigated gall to solder the processor in? You're using a low quality display? Unbelievable.
On the other end of the spectrum you have the "executoys", which are generally somewhere between ultralight MacBook Air and something like the Sony Z. Now, the Sony Z is actually one of the closest "Ultrabooks" I was looking at - awhile back it was the way to get a 1600x900 or 1920x1080 LED backlit high color gamut display, moderate graphics, and a Core i7-620 all crammed into 13" of aluminum and carbon fiber, with a backlit keyboard. Unfortunately, it was made so poorly and proprietary, keeping all the "Good options" for Japan only, you could easily spend $3000 for the "signature" edition and be stuck with some sort of crafty quad-SSD abomination that doesn't support TRIM (in Japan, you could include a normal HDD or secondary normal SSD if you didn't mind going without the BluRay burner). Even at all this, you have to use years old Sony NVIDIA drivers because even their binaries don't work...good luck if you don't use windows? Most other "Executoys" and ultralights are even worse, offering less power for exorbitant prices and narrow definitions under which their "power savings" are viable.
As much as I hate to admit it, the only two notebooks I see that even approach the "ultrabook" moniker at various times of their launching are the Mac Book Pro and HP Envy. They attempt to bring the most power into a reasonably small form factor, use high quality materials and add lots of little quality extras. Yes, you pay for it and I've no problem with that, save for the fact that I don't want to even give a cent to Apple idologically as I disagree with nearly every other item they sell on one level or another, and supporting HP, despite the very good fact that the Envy team is divorced from the typical crapfest, is still supporting HP and their spyware heavy, reliability light common notebooks. At the time, I found the Envy 14 the best compromise around ( Sadly, lacking USB3.0 for a reason I can't fathom, but the Radiance display is one of the best ever made on a notebook. That was the first thing they discontinued), but I would have liked a few more choices.
If Intel wants to bring people back onto purchasing powerful notebooks, then they ought to start with the high end who are willing to spend money on power and features. Start with the MacBook Pro, and do equal or better at a lower price. Yes, that means USB3, SATA6e,and Thunderbolt. Yes, that means highest end mobile i7 quads/hexes when available and AMD 6700-6900+ mobile graphics options (and get them ready sometime before the next gen of desktop cards is about to release for fuck's sake), backlit keyboards , metal chassis options, modular bays, and standard connectors. Use latest generation Li-Poly batteries, and systems like the HP Envy's "slice" battery to extend battery life without being unsightly or cumbersome. Use Apple's design weaknesses against them, put a damn
I've seen the same with sheet metal on cars too. Ok, so that's more crumpling than cracking, still it's not exactly unintended, what with a car being far more replaceable than the important contents inside. They do break though. I've also seen it with current laptop case materials. So what?
Somehow I've managed without a Toughbook or a tank. It's not a common enough problem for me to invest in it when I can just avoid incidents. If something does happen, the economy from buying the cheaper laptop is probably worth more given how much computers evolve over time. Especially given the weight savings.
Not that it is impossible for some fiberglass composite to be better than the current choices, but that's a matter for the material engineers.
It is great that the work-per-Watt keeps going down. Now stop making the machines thinner (i.e. stop making the batteries smaller!), so that people can actually get something out of the energy savings.
Ok, so with the new trend, the users get reduced weight. And I suppose that's nice, but how many people complain about weight compared to the number of people who complain about battery life?
And "alternatives" to metal? Please, at least put a metal rim around the perimeter of the things, preferably replaceable and with "crumple zones." ;-)
Mobile hardware is getting both awesomer and lamer at the same time. I wish someone would do it right.
It is NOT thermal design power. That is all.
you'd have to have an impossibly long upgrade cycle before it would be an upgrade over their present full sized laptop.
I've seen a lot of households with children and working-class income that have what some more well-off geeks might call impossibly long upgrade cycles. They use something until it breaks, and then they buy a used product to replace it.
For most creative tasks (and, no, I don't mean blogging about your kittens) many people a screen big enough to have a few different windows, palettes, etc.
How did people perform creative tasks when 1024x768 was the pixel count of "typical" computer monitors?
Not relying on a net connection, but using locally stored programs instead, helps tremendously.
And apart from the first few models that had tiny SSDs, all netbooks have a hard drive big enough to store at least some installed programs, even if not your library of BD rips.
netbook in my idea is a sub class of laptop that has enough processing power to consume but not enough to effectively create.
I have a Dell Inspiron Mini 1012 with a dual-core Atom CPU, 1 GB of RAM, and Ubuntu 11.04, and I can do plenty of creating on it. Apart from the 10.1" internal monitor (which can be fixed with a VGA cable and an HDTV), this is comparable to a P4 of a few years ago. I've never had a problem running GIMP on a netbook, though it needs a bit of rearrangement of tool palettes to make everything fit on a 1024x600 pixel screen. Nor have I had a problem running Modplug Tracker to compose music. It runs GCC to compile and run 2D video games, and with an external keypad and mouse, it runs Blender to edit 3D models.
What I have a problem with is the existence of devices capable of consuming but not creating. Lately, as the computing power of small devices has increased, manufacturers have begun to enforce this with mandatory verification of digital signatures more than with differences in actual computing power. If a device for consuming costs $300 but a device for creating costs $2,500 and requires a D&B D-U-N-S number, people aren't going to be tempted to just try creating one day.
But, outside of a few sorts of apps that aren't generally run on laptops, existence of USB2 (or USB3), Thunderbolt, or FireWire ports will let you use an external drive of whatever size you like.
I'd like to see a slightly new approach. Merge the tablet with the laptop. Something like a dual display laptop. One display houses all the computer parts and the second is only a screen. The second screen should be detachable. Maybe the back could be a proper keyboard.
21 millimeters? I demand at least 10 mm in key travel alone!
We are sold "business" laptops that are supposed to be our road warriors, that have gamer graphics cards in them for some idiotic reason
Because PC makers want to sell you games through their online store to play on break. Or because a lot of businesses rely on 3D design. Or because more and more applications benefit from GPU acceleration, such as Adobe Photoshop since CS4.
software is pushed to interpreted languages
Because except for mass-market software, developer time is more expensive than runtime.
How much electronics would cost today without any government regulations, taxes, subsidies altogether I wonder?
The provision of electricity itself was subsidized. The research and development of the Internet was subsidized.
Given that their X-Slim series has been around for several years before Intel's "ultrabook" announcement but it is, basically, an "ultrabook". The link above is deliberately to an AMD-powered one just for yucks, but my X340 is pure Core2 and cost all of $390. They're actually damn nice machines, even if Intel is a bit late to the party with their reinvention of them.