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Intel Corp.'s crusade to redefine the personal computer is entering a crucial phase, as a new breed of sleek skinny portables jostle with tablet-style devices and smartphones for consumer attention.
A host of companies are using next week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to show off entries in a new category called Ultrabooks, a term the chip giant coined as part of an effort to spur its customers to make more desirable products.
Manufacturers expected to introduce new thin laptops at the show include Dell Inc., Lenovo Group Ltd. and Acer Inc. The products follow portables using the Ultrabook moniker from companies such as Hewlett-Packard Co., Toshiba Corp. and Asustek Computer Inc.
Making portables smaller is hardly a new idea. Backers of Ultrabooks, inspired largely by Apple Inc.'s distinctive MacBook Air, hope to take stylish designs that typically command a premium to mainstream price points. Though Ultrabooks mostly start at roughly $899 to $1,400, hardware companies expect to soon reach more consumer-friendly prices of $699 or lower.
Ultrabooks also take a page from Apple's iPad tablet computer by booting up more quickly and operating longer on a battery charge than conventional laptops. Backers expect future models to exploit touch screens, with some converting between tablet and clamshell-style configurations.
"Consumers have had experience with tablets and features like instant-on, thin and light, and good battery like Dell HP297 battery, dell GW240 battery, dell RN873 battery, dell XR693 battery, dell 0XR693 battery, dell 312-0625 battery, Dell Latitude X200 battery, Dell 8U443 battery, Dell Latitude X200 battery, Dell 312-0058 battery life," said Jeff Barney, a vice president at Toshiba. "They're looking for the Ultrabook experience because they have had a tablet."
The stakes are high for many companies—but particularly for Intel and Microsoft Corp., dominant suppliers to PC makers whose growth rates have been surpassed as demand has swelled for other kinds of mobile devices. Sales of tablets across the globe, for example, are expected to rise nearly 63% in 2012 to more than 103 million units, predicts research firm Gartner Inc. World-wide PC shipments, by contrast, are expected to rise 4.5% to about 370 million units.
But Apple continues to prove that attractive design can have a big impact, posting a 26% jump in unit sales for its Macintosh PCs in the quarter ended in September compared with a year earlier—reaching a quarterly record for the company largely because of the MacBook Air.
That portable Mac, first introduced in 2008 at an entry price of $1,799, became more popular after a revamp in late 2010 that set the entry price at $999 and made fast-booting memory chips a standard feature to store data rather than disk drives.
"The PC industry in general got a wake-up call when Apple introduced the MacBook Air," said Tim Bajarin, an analyst at the research firm Creative Strategies. "PC guys began to realize that what Apple had was not just a big hit but was a form factor that was truly going to redefine what consumers expect in portable computers."
Intel helped marshal a response for the broader PC industry by kicking off the Ultrabook initiative in late May at a Taiwan trade show. It has set up a $300 million venture-capital fund to support related technology companies, and is expected to boost its advertising and promotional support to PC makers to drive demand for Ultrabooks.
The chip maker expects the more attractive size and features of Ultrabooks to transform the laptop category, bolstered by plans to roll out successive generations of chips to help drive up performance and battery life. Though not many Ultrabooks are quite as thin as the MacBook Air—which tapers from a thickness of 0.68 inch to 0.11 inch at one point—Intel expects dimensions to shrink rapidly.
"This is very much the new way we're going to use PCs going into the future, making them much more mobile than they were before," said Dadi Perlmutter, executive vice president of Intel's architecture group.
Intel predicts Ultrabooks will account for about 40% of consumer portable PC sales in 2012. Some market researchers expect a slower transition; IHS iSuppli sees Ultrabooks hitting 43% of world-wide notebook PC shipments by 2015.
Manufacturers are hoping for a different experience than the last time Intel helped promote a new portable category: netbooks. The small, no-frills style of laptop that started at around $300 quickly gained traction in 2008. Sales later slowed sharply, partly because netbooks didn't have the processing power for many computing tasks. The iPad and other tablets also emerged as attractive alternatives for simple tasks such as surfing the Web.
Ultrabooks, by contrast, have beefier Intel microprocessors and snappy response times. Acer, for example, says its Aspire S3 Ultrabooks, which start at $899, have a feature that lets users resume a paused computing session in fewer than two seconds and connect to the Internet in 2.5 seconds. The company boasts 50 days of standby power and as many as six hours of continuous usage.
"We really want to reinvigorate the [PC] category, and Ultrabook is one vehicle for that," said Sumit Agnihotry, Acer vice president of product marketing for the Americas.
H-P, the world's largest personal-computer maker, unveiled an Ultrabook in November called "Folio 13." The company puts the laptop's thickness at roughly half the diameter of a dime, and its battery life at about nine hours. It costs about $900.
Lower pricing will be crucial, industry executives and analysts say. One obstacle is flash memory, which tends to be a costly alternative to disk-based data storage, though chip prices keep coming down.
Toshiba, for example, has offered an entry-level Ultrabook—which ordinarily sells for $799—in a limited-time promotion at electronics retailer Best Buy Co. for $699 during the holiday season. Toshiba, a major maker of flash-memory chips, says manufacturing some of its own components helps reduce costs.
In all, Intel said 10 or 11 Ultrabook models were likely to have shipped by the end of 2011, with about 60 designs in the pipeline for 2012. The company is hosting a news conference on Jan. 9, the day before the formal opening of the Consumer Electronics Show, which is expected to showcase new Ultrabooks and marketing plans for them.
While it is hard to imagine thin designs turning off consumers, establishing Ultrabooks as a separate product category might be a taller order. Consumers could get confused as manufacturers introduce similar-looking laptops without the Ultrabook name.
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. tends to use the phrase "ultrathin notebooks," because the term Ultrabook has been trademarked by Intel and requires use of its chips. Consumers might have some suspicions about new product categories, after what they "just went through with netbooks," said John Taylor, AMD's director of global product marketing.
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