WinSuperSite’s Paul Thurrott says he recently purchased a ASUS Zenbook, one of a handful of first-generation Ultrabooks currently in the market and the one he thinks most closely resembles Apple’s MacBook Air.
Thurrott allows that And while he’s very enthusiastic about the Ultrabook form factor overall, he’s not sure he can recommend this particular rendition, at least not universally.
Windows-centric Thurrott concedes that the MacBook Air is a fine machine, but maintains that it’s not ideal as a Windows laptop although it’s beautiful to look at and, thanks to its thin profile and low weight, an ideal travel companion. If only it were better suited to running Windows.
Enter the Ultrabook, which Thurrott acknowledges is a bald-faced attempt to copy Apple’s design for the MacBook Air and apply it to Windows-based PCs, an endeavour that’s not yet been entirely successful. However, he notes that second generation Ultrabooks will ship throughout 2012 featuring more efficient third-generation Intel Core i-Series (“Ivy Bridge”) processors anticipated to offer better performance, better battery life, and allow for even thinner and lighter form factors. That said, he observes “most of these machines won’t move very far beyond the basic look and feel of the MacBook Air.”
However, Thurrott predicts that things will get a lot more interesting with third generation Ultrabooks, which he says will be hybrid devices whose “guts” will live behind the display rather than under the keyboard, mening that they can be used as pure tablet devices, but with the ability to plug into a keyboard dock and they become traditional clamshell laptops. He says these hybrid devices will ship with Windows 8 in late 2012, with true third generation Ultrabooks more closely resembling iPads with a clip-on keyboard base. He expects Windows 8 to unleash further Ultrabook design innovations and predicts that the next year is going to be an amazing one for portable computing.
I couldn’t agree more on that point.
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