The high end of the PC laptop spectrum has been neglected for years. I guess the market is just too small to care about. I have no idea where they're taking their profits if they're pushing down on the low-end prices too.<p>I've been looking for a new laptop for over 2 years, and nobody's been selling anything worthy of replacing what I'm already using, which was built in 2010. For a few brief months that year, HP made a wonderful MBP clone (magnesium alloy case, 1600x900 14" screen with edge-to-edge glass, SSD, etc). Soon after, that product line turned into the same plastic 1366x768 crap everyone else was selling, and that's been what's filled store shelves ever since. Meanwhile, my 2010 laptop is starting to fall apart, with dead pixels, an overheating GPU and lost battery capacity.<p>I am looking forward to buying an ASUS UX301 this November to replace it. That's the first and only Ultrabook-class laptop I've seen since 2010 that'll actually be an "upgrade" without buying some thick "gaming" monstrosity. It'll have a Haswell i7-4558U, which comes with the Intel HD 5100 graphics, the first Intel integrated graphics chip to outmatch the 3-year-old Radeon in my current laptop. Plus 8GB RAM, 512GB of RAID-0 SSD, an all metal and glass case and up to 9 hours of battery life. Assuming this PC in that configuration actually makes it to market.<p>What's amazing to me is that this many months after Haswell parts started showing up in stores, that one ASUS laptop is still the only announced product by any name-brand manufacturer with the i7-4558U/HD 5100 parts. Every other new/"refreshed" laptop that'll be in stores this holiday season will either have an integrated GPU incapable of playing games well on the higher resolution screens they ship with, or give up its thickness and battery life for a discrete GPU.
This is a bad thing for the industry. Every time someone buys a junky $300 laptop filled with bloatware from HP, Dell, eMachines, etc. they are going to have a mediocre experience at best. Then they buy a $200 tablet from Amazon or Google, a $300 iPad Mini or a $500 iPad that while all of those devices should be less powerful, they deliver a MUCH BETTER end user experience.<p>HP, Dell, Lenovo need to stop selling the bottom of the barrel hardware with bottom of the barrel Windows experiences. The end business result is they are working really hard to sell a zero margin product only to watch Intel and Microsoft turn a tidy profit.<p>If HP, Dell, and Lenovo want to stay in the game long term, they need to stop catering to the low end.
I said this here a while ago. Intel had only 2 options, and they are <i>both</i> bad for them:<p>1) keep going up market, and be disrupted in the most classical way possible<p>2) compete with ARM on price, which is unsustainable for a company like Intel<p>Not only is Intel used to high margins on its chips, but it's also a very small player in the mobile world, and the PC world is shrinking continuously, so "making it up" in the PC market won't cut it.<p>Also, if they're promoting "$300 Haswell notebooks", virtually nobody will buy $700-$1000 notebooks in the future, and Intel will <i>never</i> be able to raise prices, and their profits, again.<p>Whether Intel will die like Blackberry and Nokia (yes, I consider the acquisition as dying, since it was a move out of bankruptcy desperation) or will survive as a tiny shadow of what they used to be, I'm unsure.<p>I suppose it's possible for them to survive as a company that is 1/10 of what they used to be, if they really compete on price, and make radical changes within the company (end all unprofitable/low volume divisions and fire execs or engineers that are too expensive). But that really depends on how willing they are to make those hard decisions.
Plan on buying the Dell venue 8 pro the day it comes out.<p>-x86? check<p>-bay trail? check<p>-long battery? check<p>-stylus support? check<p>-high ppi? check<p>-under $300? check<p>Perfect notebook replacement. Not a laptop replacement but as a companion device it is perfect.
The cheapie Bay Trail convertibles seem like, potentially, the much more awesome--lighter, more touch-tastic and fun--revenge of the netbook. The 'problem,' such as it is, is that lots of the target audience already has tablets or faster small laptops, sort of squeezing the convertibles from either side. That and that Win8 can't seem to catch a break.
$99 tablets have been a reality for a long time at various sizes, or up to quad core CPUs for 7" tablets. In fact, ~$49 tablets (mostly 7") have been around for a while.<p>Just not with Intel CPUs.<p>Expect prices to drop again and specs to be revised up in the run up to christmas, which means Intel is still on the trailing edge in the low end of the tablet market.
I really really miss my 5 year old old Lenovo T61p! 1400*1050 is the perfect screensize for me and the Core 2 Duo would still be fast enough for most applications. Perhaps I will buy one on ebay for 220 Euro...
A small, light notebook with a good battery for $300 is pushing into impulse buy territory for me, with the condition that it's not an enormous pain to install linux on. I will be watching closely.
This would not be an unheard of tactic for Intel (go for cheap) but it seems ill advised against ARM. I get the 'Quark' but I don't get trying to sell a Haswell CPU at Cortex A9 prices. That seems like it would be jumping the gun. Of course the issues at 14nm may be worse than we thought and Intel needs this for cashflow but still, I'm guessing ZDNet hype.
Any hope for some of these to be running Ubuntu pre-loaded? Potentially they can be cheaper due to lack of Windows licensing. The only alternative today is Chrome OS (and there are quite a few new ones released already) and Windows 8 (oh the horror)
I wish they stopped forcing touchscreens on their users. I would so buy a Haswell-based follow-up to the Asus Zenbook UX51VZ as a developer machine, but having fingerprints on a glossy display is a showstopper for me.