Intel Wants to Redefine Notebooks with Ultrabooks

With tablets getting more and more popular, the hype surrounding netbooks has fizzled out. Intel’s presence in the tablet space is less than impressive and they hope to start a whole new thing with Notebooks called Ultrabooks. Now, Intel says that the new Ultrabooks should be out by the end of this year. Intel’s aim, it appears, is to have ultra thin notebooks with much better performance and security than what netbooks have to offer. The first thing that then comes to mind are products such as the Lenovo X1 and also the Macbook Air. It’s hard to imagine that something like that would happen really soon. To be a big thing like netbooks were, pricing of the products and Intel’s components would have to be very aggressive.

The future is slim?

Intel says that Ultrabooks would be thinner than 21mm and would have a really quick start-up time. A mention of Intel’s Rapid Start technology is present on that blog post. The aim is to have the devices boot up from sleep within seconds and effortlessly, too. Taking a cue from the netbook, battery life of these devices should also cross five hours. There’s also a mention of security features such as Intel’s Identity Protection feature and Anti-Theft technology, which basically allows disabling of notebooks when stolen. This remote kill-switch was something that was being talked about even before the Sandy Bridge line of processors were launched. How impressive ultrabooks turn out to be will depend highly on the pricing. With the MacBook Air and the Lenovo X1 being priced well above the Rs. 60,000 mark, it’s not something that everyone is going to go out and buy.

More from News & Analysis

What is the US HIRE Bill and why is India’s $250-billion IT sector worried? Is the internet dead? What's this theory that OpenAI's Sam Altman says might be true?