Acer Says $799 Ultrabooks Unprofitable, Aims For $499 Price Regardless

The Verge’s Vlad Savov quotes Acer Global President Jianren Weng speaking at the CeBIT trade show in Hannover, Germany predicting that PC Ultrabooks will drop to $499 in 2013 and consequently be able to compete directly against Apple’s iPad. However he reports that Christoph Pohlmann of Acer’s laptop team told hom even the current $799 / $699 price for the Aspire S3 is too low for Acer to generate any profit from it, with the company merely breaking even on the entry-level Ultrabook model and that component and manufacturing costs are prohibitive for any price point approaching a sub-$500 ultrabook.

However, Savov thinks Jianren Weng and Acer’s leadership team may well feel that they need a counterpunch to Apple’s tablet hegemony by selling ultrathin laptops even at a loss.

First Discrete GPU Ultrabook

Also from CeBit 2012 The Register’s Caleb Cox reports that Acer has announced a 15-inch Ultrabook and a range of slimline notebooks, and that Acer’s Aspire Timeline Ultra M3 packs a 15in display with the latest Intel Core processor and a dedicated Nvidia GeForce GT640M graphics chip, making it the first Ultrabook with a discrete graphics processor unit in addition to HD Graphics integrated graphics processor, and also the first to include both an optical drive and HDD, with a SSD-only config optional.

Acer’s V3 series, available in 14in, 15.6in and 17.3in versions are powered by the latest Intel Core processors and include an Nvidia GeForce GT series graphics setup.