Ultrabook Pricing Unlikely to Reach $599-699 Range till 2013

[btarunr]

Affordable Ultrabooks, which strike a cost-benefit sweet-spot when priced in the US $599-699 range are unlikely to become a reality till 2013, sources among notebook vendors told DigiTimes. The same sources also note that pricing will be the key to driving demand for Ultrabooks. They attribute this to high production costs, which will likely persist till next year.

Components such as SSDs, which are key to keeping these devices ultra-slim, cost 10-times as much as HDDs, custom-design ultra-thin display panels, and aluminum unibody chassis are still quite expensive, even as major ODMs are ramping up infrastructure to mass-produce some of these components. Even with the most aggressive cost-cutting, the cheapest Ultrabooks available in 2012 will cost US $799.



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[R_1]

Well, if you got to chose between Ultra book and a tablet. Regarding weight a tablet is ~ 3 time lighter. As for the battery life a new 28nm SoC design tablet, Qualcomm Krait based for instance, will approach 24 hour battery life vs. 3-5 hour for 20Watt Ultarabook (40 watt-hour battery). Comparing screens: 10" IPS screen on a tablet, with some insane pixels per inch resolution vs. 11-13" extremely cheap TN Ultarabook display with washed-out colors, poor viewing angles, low contrast ratio, bad anti-aliasing for text reading and sub HD resolution. So which one will you chose. I didn't even mentioned the price difference: $499 vs. $1600.

 

[n-ster]

lol because suddenly ever ultrabook is 1600$? I also like how you did 499$ instead of 500$ to make it seem even cheaper. Also note that you are talking about technology that is not even available yet. I can see through your BS.
Tablets and ultrabooks are usually not for the same functions either. Ultrabooks will completely replace your laptops netbooks and tablets, while tablets are just an addition to your laptop and netbook.

If you want to compare tablets to ultrabooks, then it should be a comparision between the ASUS EP121 and the Acer S3. The Acer S3 can be found at 799$, while the you'd be lucky to find the EP121 at 749$. The price difference is minimal, the power and HDD space etc of the S3 is much better. The Acer S3, known for bad battery life, has AT LEAST over 50% better battery life.

Now if you want to compare a standard tablet to something, compare it to netbooks