Pushing Ultrabooks over netbooks is a good move by Intel that benefits the whole PC laptop industry — in more ways than just potentially raising margins. Even if Ultrabooks are more expensive than netbooks, they hold a significant edge in processing power, aesthetics, and features, over netbooks. This edge means that an Ultrabook owners can go longer between purchases than a netbook owner. Assuming this works out to mean that, on average, Ultrabook owners are spending about as much as netbook owners are spending over time, Ultrabooks provide a significantly better reputation to the PC laptop market (thanks to superior design and features) than that of their netbook brethren.

What consumers didn’t realize is that they were paying less for computers, but it was crap hardware so they had to replace them more often to keep up. The end result being that people weren’t actually saving money, but they were getting inferior computing products. Also from a previous article:

n the last several years, netbooks have become quite popular for a number of reasons. They succeed because users began to move away from traditional software and into the cloud. This made the optical drive mostly a waste of space and cost. With cloud computing came generally lower processing requirements, and both of these factors allowed laptop makers to trim the excess fat from the usual laptop and turn it into the netbook. Netbooks aren’t perfect however, they work for cloud productivity, but they frequently struggle with anything as soon as it comes to multimedia. Efforts have been made to rectify this issue with discrete graphics, but as Chippy points out, discrete graphics are not the way to go if you want to enable high-efficiency computing.

Instead, Ultrabooks add back the multimedia capabilities that were cut out when netbooks went under the scalpel. Maybe they thought we wouldn’t miss it too much — apparently they were wrong. Intel has added vital hardware encoding and decoding directly to the Ultrabook platform for multimedia playback and basic editing. The processors, while not blazing compared to much larger and heavier laptops, are far more capable of utilizing heavy (in the eyes of a netbook) multimedia applications like iTunes and Spotify, and the same goes for photo viewing and editing software. Instead of discrete graphics, Intel has pushed to return good performance for these specifically missed functions to a completely on-board platform.

With Ultrabooks, consumers can expect a certain speed and performance from their computers. Intel’s best silicon goes into these devices and they have an impressive range of power from very low power with high battery life to high performance for desktop scenarios. They are thin, light, and power efficient which means they last a long time but don’t take forever to charge. I for one am very happy to see netbooks replaced with Ultrabooks; for the consumer they represent a better value.

At a time when Windows 8 challenges computer manufacturers to find a way to converge touch screens and all-purpose computers, Intel’s highly restrictive Ultrabook concept is exactly not what the manufacturers need. Rather than aspire to earn the label “Ultrabook” by meeting Intel’s arbitrary conditions, manufacturers would do better to ignore this particular Intel marketing device and focus on finding genuinely satisfying ways to improve portability and battery life on touch-enabled Windows PCs.

After all, consumers buy based on what they see in the shops. It doesn’t matter to them whether it’s called “Ultrabook” or not.

While there’s also more than just compromises on case design and hybrid drive options going towards lowering the cost of Ultrabooks in future models.

Ivy Bridge will be introducing some of Intel’s newer technology like their announced Tri-gate transistors (which claims up to 50% power consumption reduction), PCI Express 3.0, DDR3 low voltage for mobile processors (could shave 4-19W from your power draw), dynamic configurable TDP (adjusts power usage as needed), Power Aware Interrupt Routing (PAIR) technology (like auto turning off USB ports when not being used), etc. Along with reducing manufacturing size to 22nm. All of which will help address both the pricing and power efficiency issues.

While Ivy Bridge will be also boosting performance a little higher than what Sandy Bridge offers. Like the GMA will add support for DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.1, and OpenCL 1.1, 16 execution units (EUs) compared to Sandy Bridge’s maximum of 12.

So don’t lose hope quite yet, though it may take the addition of Haswell, which brings the whole thing into a SoC design, before we really see the technology for making Ultrabooks practical for the masses come into play.

Adam

I agree with you completely when it comes to battery life, though. We’ve got a doubling in battery technology only once every 10 years and a doubling of processing power every 18 months; we certainly can’t expect battery technology to get us increases in battery life; it HAS to be the semiconductor and component manufacturers who bring it.

Intel has been listening to the gamers and perf nuts too much *Cough Ananadtech *Cough and really screwed mobile enthusiasts with Sandybridge and we saw a battery life decline in almost every use case scenario vs. the Core2 CPUs.
-YES we get more performance per watt but who cares if over-all battery life declines!?!?!

There should NEVER be an over-all increase in power consumption in a laptop platform any more.

I’m glad to see they have addressed this in the roadmap, but Sandybridge has been painful and with the revised messaging on the Ivy Bridge platform’s power increases I’m not hoping for huge increases in Ivy Bridge. (Yes huge graphics perf increases, but battery? -We’ll have to see.)

I’m quickly losing hope that the price decreases will be a good trade off. The supposed price decreases come from allowing fiberglass chassis (which takes us back to normal non-ultrabook PC looks and feels) and the hybrid SSD stick+ traditional HDD strategy and so far the Acer utilizing this combo is testing horribly in storage performance and boot times compared to it’s pure SSD bretheren.

The talk about the Ivy Bridge Ultrabooks having “retina-like” ultra high resolution displays also makes me think that lowering the price is NOT a goal in the v.Next Ultrabooks.

I don’t think sacrificing disk perf or trading out metal unibody designs for fiberglass is the right way to get the perf drop unless the hybrid SSD+HDD options get better in a hurry.

The problems in Ultrabooks are all in Intel’s arena: MORE efficiency and lower prices. (We need Ivy Bridge to get us back to a FULL 8 hours of light use (none of this 4-6 hour crap) and we need the cost of the CPUs to come down. (60% profit margin is unjustified.)

-I’d probably pay $1000 for an X31 if I could get it with a true 8 hours of battery life, though.
(I don’t think you really have a mass market product until we see another 30% drop in the total price, though and much of that should come from a reduction in the CPU markup.)

Adam