The Inverse Law of Tech Prices: the smaller the computer, the more expensive.
The Inverse Law of Technology Prices states that,
- The smaller the computer, the more expensive
- Prices of all technology will fall with time (except Apple products)
- It has not been tested whether number 2 is true with regards to Ultrabooks
Greatly touted by Intel as the next big thing in notebook development, ultrabooks is seen as a strong competitor to netbooks and the traditional notebook, given their good processing power, portability and targeted price. Asus, which announced its first ultrabook, the UX21 at Computex this year in Taipei, is now predicting a off-the-shelf price of $1,000 to $2,000.
According to the Taipei Times,
Asustek Computer Inc (華碩), the world’s No. 5 PC brand, yesterday said its upcoming UX series Ultrabook platform would fail to carry price tags of less than US$1,000, as claimed by Intel Corp.
“Unless we use Intel Core i3 chips [the Ultrabooks will not be less than US$1,000]. The price tags will have to go beyond US$1,000 if [more advanced] i5 and i7 chips go into the notebooks,” a person familiar with UX development said.
The UX series will mainly use i5 and i7 to boost performance, he said.
The i5 and i7 chips, which are more expensive, plus the operating system and solid-state hard drives would account for about 50 percent of the cost of the ultraslim notebooks, thus driving up the price of the UX series to between US$1,000 and US$2,000, he said.
This falls short of the expectations put forth by Intel when marketing the Ultrabook, promising prices that are US$1,000 or less. And this begs the question whether you would be better off just buying a Macbook Air and dual-booting Windows on it to achieve great portable computing with the style, status and whatever feelings you get with a Macbook.
However, one must note that Asus is equipping its premier Ultrabook with the highest-end of components – Intel Core i7 processors and a solid state drive, both big culprits of a fattening price tag. And then it comes naturally that if Asus were to put less esoteric and more down-to-earth components, perhaps it would be able to achieve Intel’s vision of an Ultrabook, and that would mean something like a Core i3 and hard drive. Asus does promise a version with an i3 which will cost less than $1,000, though. Of course, Asus shouldn’t take the rap for all this either – Acer isn’t expecting their’s to be less than $1,000 either.
I’m not sure who Intel intends to target the Ultrabook at, but I suspect that it would be somewhere along the lines of the college-going-person who has a problem with weight and has no interest in serious gaming. And that means that the Ultrabook has a problem – the high-end netbook with AMD’s Fusion chips can easily wipe the Ultrabook out in terms of price and functionality, perhaps size too, although it won’t be in the thickness dimension.
Asus is the first of many manufacturers which are going to roll out their own iterations of the Ultrabook. The second-half of 2011 will see HP, Dell, Lenovo and Acer come into the fray in Q3 and Q4 2011. Perhaps it will be then and there that things start looking up for the consumer looking for a Ultrabook. The question is who will be able to achieve all that Intel envisions?
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