14 DAY TRIAL // There have been some promising ultrabooks making the rounds on the Internet as of late, and Intel is now confirming that yes, everything is going according to plan.
The biggest barrier in front of mass adoption of ultrabooks continues to be the high price, most often hovering around $1,000, or 750 Euro.
Dell, HP, Toshiba and others all have such high-priced machines on sale in fact.
Nevertheless, the industry is pushing forward, in no small part because of Intel's relentlessness.
So far, about 26 mobile PCs of this type have begun to sell, and Intel promises that the number will become 75 by the end of the year (2012).
Ten of the upcoming new ones have already been announced by Lenovo, Gigabyte, Acer, Fujitsu, etc.
In fact, we spotted two of the more conveniently priced just today (March 27), even if they are restricted to just one country.
One of them is the Novatech nFinity, in the UK, while the other one was made by Lesance and is available only in Japan (for now).
Intel and its OEMs repeatedly stated that their goal for 2012, or one of them, was making sure super-thin and light notebooks attained the price “sweet spot” of $600-$700.
The newest ULV CPUs are going to assist in this regard, but we'll wait for more developments before deciding whether or not we are of the opinion that the plan is reaching success.
After all, it has already been nine months since the first ultrabooks appeared and there hasn't been much progress.
Then again, not many chips fit for the category appeared during this time, so that's partially justified. Only partially, because the rest of the components, especially the SSDs, are expensive too, although the issue is being counterbalanced by hybrid drives, to some extent (HDDs with some NAND Flash memory cache).