I’m going with everyone else. Average users won’t be able to tell the difference in performance. The only people who can tell would be the ones who actually follow up on these things.

Let’s compare to say… general education. Of course there are people that will do well regardless whether general education level is high or not. But having a standardized easy access education allows the entire population to benefit, rather than a select few.

Yes, you are right such features would come to regular Notebooks… eventually. But you don’t know how long it will take. The Ultrabook push accelerates this trend, and that’s a good thing.

Oh, and the most important part for the last. I reckon very soon most Ultrabooks will end up in the Convertible/Hybrid category which will then dispel all the comments about “ultrabooks not being different”.

larc :

I shutdown my notebook. I wouldn’t want a driver bug to cause sleep and hibernate issues. All too often I read sleep and hibernate issues in driver release notes. With more external devices attached, the worse your chances are. So “power” users should probably shutdown.

Even Ubuntu has decided to disable hibernate (suspend to disk) and just only have a sleep/suspend to RAM option.

The “average” consumer you’re talking about who only knows that ultrabooks are good would probably be happy with any notebook anyway.

I almost exclusively use sleep (for years now). I’ve never had trouble with it and it saves me lots of time.

It isn’t about what average consumers would be ‘happy’ with, it’s about giving them a quality experience regardless of whether or not they know any better.

Even Ubuntu has decided to disable hibernate (suspend to disk) and just only have a sleep/suspend to RAM option.

The “average” consumer you’re talking about who only knows that ultrabooks are good would probably be happy with any notebook anyway.

There will always be low end and high end notebooks which includes ultrabooks. Nothing has changed other than a different way to create advertisements.

Your average PC buyer knows little about the difference between SSD, HHD, and HDD — let alone how to upgrade one. Same goes for what Smart Response or Rapid Boot do. I would venture to say most of them shut their computers down instead of using sleep or standby. Ultrabooks help guide these sorts of users toward a better computing experience without them needed to know the specifics or compare processors. Having used an Ultrabooks for many months now as my primary machine, both at the desk and on the go, I can safely say Ultrabooks provide a raised bar over your typical $6/7/800 laptop that companies are trying to sell to average PC users.

Then there’s the high-end Ultrabooks for power users like you and me that want premium materials, size, weight, battery life, and design. These Ultrabooks tends to be some of the nicest machines on the market.

Battery life – From what I’ve seen ultrabooks aren’t leading in this area compared to regular notebooks.

Size – Okay they’re thin but that often causes design issues (deal breakers to some).

There aren’t any truly defining differences between notebooks and ultrabooks. They’re all really, as you’ve said, choices in the notebook category. You haven’t really refuted anything from PC Advisor. I wouldn’t go out and buy an ultrabook but instead buy a notebook with x, y and z features. I’m sure these supposed ultrabook only features would have come to regular notebooks without the ultrabook term. It’s just that Intel is promoting these features on ultrabooks for marketing purposes even though they’re also on regular notebooks anyway.

The ultrabook campaign is just a way to get people excited over notebooks with higher margins again.