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Follow on Google News | Windows Laptop Makers Can't Catch Up to Apple’s MacBook AirFor every laptop manufacturer not named “Apple”, the race is on to make new super-thin and super-light laptops. Intel calls them Ultrabooks, and the name is catching on, despite being sort of silly
By: battery Here’s a question for you: why didn’t HP, Dell, Acer, Samsung, or some other huge PC manufacturer build the Air before Apple? The answer is: they did. Sony’s X505 was a razor-thin laptop weighing less than 2 pounds, and it came out in 2003! More recently, Dell introduced the Adamo in 2009, and later that year the even thinner Adamo XPS. These laptops didn’t sell. Sony’s cost over three grand. Dell’s were also too expensive, and the battery life was pitiful. Instead of fixing those problems, Dell killed the Adamo line. Sony and Dell built nearly-great products with critical flaws and instead of challenging their engineers and designers to find ways to address those flaws, they concluded that nobody really wanted these systems. Apple didn’t give up, though. Drive too thick and too slow? Apple commissioned a special case-less SSD that could fit in its slim design. It worked to make the motherboard smaller, the components cheaper, and crammed as much lithium polymer battery as it could fit in the case. By 2010, the Air had evolved from an overpriced, underpowered status toy to the must-have computer of our day. Dell vostro 1510 battery - http://www.batteryfast.co.uk/ My point here is not simply that PC manufacturers are quitters. It’s that they have the entirely wrong mindset to build must-have products. Several times a year, I have meetings with major PC manufacturers about their upcoming product lines, and the tenor is always the same: “Our customers told us this is what they want, and our market research says this is what people are buying, so we made this great product to address that market!” There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but you’ll never set any trends that way. If you want to make the product that everyone else compares their product to, you have to go outside the envelope. You have to take a risk to build something nobody has told you they want, because they don’t know they want it yet, and then you have to invest in it and stick with it until you get it right. The real irony here is that their marketing departments are constantly striving to find differentiators: Building a better Air - or even just a cheaper one - is proving to be difficult. Those unibody aluminum chassis on MacBooks make them really rigid despite the thin design, and Apple has booked solid all the lathes capable of carving a laptop body out of a single block of metal. Challengers like the Samsung Series 9 have metal bodies, but without the satisfying stiff feel and seamless edges of one carved from a single chuck of alloy. Of course, the Series 9 is also quite expensive. When one of the main reasons people don’t buy a Mac these days is because they can’t buy one for less than $1,000, pricing your Mac alternative well above that price doesn’t do you any favors. There are other pretenders to the ultrabook throne coming this fall. There’s the Asus UX51, and the Acer Aspire 3951. Rumor has it HP will unveil an ultrabook soon. What do all these systems have in common? They’re too late. Yes, the ultra-thin form factor made popular by the Air is rising in popularity, and if priced right some of these systems will sell pretty well. Sales numbers notwithstanding, they’ll suffer the ignominious fate of being labeled also-rans. They’ll be “MacBook Air-like.” The problem with PC manufacturers is not that they can’t build a computer as good as the hottest Apple thing, it’s that they’re constantly trying to. Apple is in the driver’s seat. If you aim at a fast-moving target, you’re sure to hit behind it. While HP, Acer, Asus, and others are worrying about how to make a MacBook Air killer, Apple is busy redefining the rest of its laptop line. Intel is kicking in $300M to drive the ultrabook category with new inventions and new, cheaper SSDs will help drive costs down. By the time all the PC manufacturers figure out how to make a cheaper laptop that is as thin, light, and long-lived as a MacBook Air, everyone will be drooling over the new MacBook Apple will have just introduced. I suppose we can’t expect a lot of creativity and focus from companies that think a random string of letters and numbers make for appropriate product names. Toshiba pa3399u-2brs battery Here’s a bit of free advice for the PC manufacturers: Here’s another free idea: make netbooks half as thick as they are today. Intel has advanced the Atom platform over the years, AMD has that tiny Fusion E-series chip, there’s no optical drive, and the rest of the internals are minimal at best. Yet netbooks still basically look like they did four years ago when the genre was new. There’s no good reason a system that small, that cheap, with that little horsepower, should be more than two-thirds of an inch thick. Consider the story of Hewlett-Packard’ More Information: # # # http://www.batteryfast.co.uk/ We aim at offering the most updated and high quality consumer electronics to shoppers from all over the world End
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