> In the mean time, the real problems still remain. The form factor is abjectly broken, mainly too thin for the purpose ... until they find a way to update the laws of physics, don’t hold your breath ... Want a realistic number of ports? Nope, VGA for a projector or monitor? Nope, too thin. Full height Ethernet? Not possible. Removable battery? Not a chance. Keyboard with actual travel? Guess why that isn’t on the cards? Any chance for expansion? Yeah right. Luckily, if you have a dongle fetish, Ultrabooks are for you, some even have a mini-VGA port that no one else does, how convenient. The entire form factor is simply dumb.
And yet Apple is selling millions of Ultrabooks under the name MacBook Air. Guess what they don't have: VGA ports, ethernet ports, removable batteries, a "keyboard with actual travel" (surprisingly comfortable to type on, actually). They're just as thin as other Ultrabooks. How is the form factor "abjectly broken" or "simply dumb" if Apple can sell so many?
If customers are unwilling to buy Ultrabooks, then obviously something is wrong, but it doesn't seem to fundamentally be a form factor issue. Maybe the high-end market has settled on Apple as the premium producer, and they're not even looking at PCs anymore. (I hope not. I work for Microsoft.) Maybe the Ultrabooks that are hitting the market are still just not that good. (Most of the ones I've tried felt like cheap crap, or had obvious deficiencies like big fan vents on the bottom....) Maybe there's something else holding them back. It's not simply a problem of lack of consumer interest in the form factor, though.
Looks like, by that defintion, Airs (5M/yr per cnet) make up about 1/3 of the "Ultrabook" market (10M/yr per linked article, not including Apple products). That would probably make them the most successful model, but I don't think that it really validates what you're saying. If the Air was clearly "what people want" it would be doing better than a smallish fraction, no?
The source I was looking at claimed 2.8 million Airs in (fiscal) Q2 of FY12, but digging in, it looks like that is the total for all MacBooks. So you're right that these stats don't indicate that the Air is necessarily what customers want.
Still, 10M/year for a category that launched only a year ago? Obviously not what Intel hoped for, but that doesn't seem so shabby to me. It certainly doesn't tell me that customers are completely uninterested.
Yeah. The news is that the earlier projection from the same analyst was 20M. I guess the notion was that Ultrabooks would cannibalize existing netbook and "cheap laptop" sales in a way that they didn't. Instead, manufacturers are chasing the "Macbook Air" market instead, which is at a different price point. And they're not even doing it badly per those numbers. But they aren't hitting what had been expected in the market as a whole.
And yet Apple is selling millions of Ultrabooks under the name MacBook Air. Guess what they don't have: VGA ports, ethernet ports, removable batteries, a "keyboard with actual travel" (surprisingly comfortable to type on, actually). They're just as thin as other Ultrabooks. How is the form factor "abjectly broken" or "simply dumb" if Apple can sell so many?
If customers are unwilling to buy Ultrabooks, then obviously something is wrong, but it doesn't seem to fundamentally be a form factor issue. Maybe the high-end market has settled on Apple as the premium producer, and they're not even looking at PCs anymore. (I hope not. I work for Microsoft.) Maybe the Ultrabooks that are hitting the market are still just not that good. (Most of the ones I've tried felt like cheap crap, or had obvious deficiencies like big fan vents on the bottom....) Maybe there's something else holding them back. It's not simply a problem of lack of consumer interest in the form factor, though.