Meet the Ultrabooks: OEM and ODMs Show Off Designs at IDF
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 13, 2011 1:11 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- IDF 2011
- Trade Shows
- Ultrabook
IDF is well underway and we've just gone through the Ultrabook section of the convention center. Everyone from Foxconn to Lenovo had Sandy Bridge based Ultrabook designs at the show. Remember the Ultrabook roadmap is a three year plan, these first solutions will simply bring thinner and lighter designs. There are some common trends exhibited by all Ultrabooks: primarily the chiclet keyboard and many of them make liberal use of aluminum.
Check out the gallery below for shots of all the systems at the show.
Gallery: Ultrabooks at IDF from OEMs & ODMs
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Aloonatic - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
What has travelling a lot with a laptop (which I do a fair bit of, as it happens) got to do with an ever so slightly thinner laptop being "exciting"?FYI (and any other Apple fan who hasn;t realised this yet) electronics have been getting smaller, lighter, thinner and more compact forever, and companies have made shiny/pretty versions of almost every electronic product that's every existed too.
Just saying (not intending to sound patronising at all, honest. *rolls eyes*)
steven75 - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
You really can't see these are 100% direct responses to the MacBook Air line or are you being deliberately obtuse?It is an objective fact that these came out after the MBA and look nearly identical. Whether they would have eventually come up with this design on their own is subject to debate, but clearly they were heavily influenced by Apple's designs.
Aloonatic - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
They might be competing with them, but that doesn't mean that they are directly copying them.Are/were/would Apple products that look similar or were made out of the same/similar materials as other companies products that existed already be directly ripping them off and copying? Of course not.
The only people who are begin deliberately obtuse seem to be Apple fans who think that Apple were the first people to come up with the idea of making an existing electronic device smaller/more compact and/or then making them out of brushed metal so that they look fancy.
They weren't, it's been going on for years, nay decades.
erple2 - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
To me, they look like an evolution of a laptop (they all have a display that can be "closed", they all have a keyboard, they all have some peripheral slots, and they all have a touchpad, just like every other laptop) into a thinner (and hopefully lighter) form factor. Was Apple first to make them that thin? As far as I know, though some Sony designs were awfully thin, too. But as someone earlier posted, "thin" is not a patentable design.One of Apple's innovations may have been is that, as pointed out above, that it was 'possible' to come out with such a device. Their other innovation was that they showed others that there was a market for that device. Once you can demonstrate a market for the device, you start seeing other manufacturers starting to poke around in the "ultra thin" segment.
damianrobertjones - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
Exactly but you'll ALWAYS get someone pulling the apple card.bupkus - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
Right, but it is no annoying listening to an individuals insecurity.steven75 - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
Then why didn't they make these exact laptops before the MBA came out?Alien959 - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
Toshiba Portage series were almost that thin in 1999. I remember a model with low voltage p3 733 coppermine and polymer battery, thickness around 12mm 1.2 kilograms.etamin - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
Who the hell cares that it "looks like the MBA"???? I'm sure think notebooks were modeled in the past years before the MBA...only it wasn't a feasible manufacturable as a profitable product due to pricing and/or internal hardware limitations. I give Apple credit for being the first to implement a monoblock aluminum chassis, but I honestly do not like their designs. As an amateur artist, I appreciate the subtle design differences between all similar utilitarian goods and I don't think ANY notebook out there looks like a MBA aside from thinness.Hell, Jaguar recently announced the C-X16 Concept, and I shit you not, I have drawn sketches of cars that look 90% similar to it two years ago. There really are only SO MANY ways to design utilitarian goods (designers sketch hundreds of designs before production of a single product that consumers see) and these subtle differences count. If there ever was a notebook that got it right in terms of design, my vote goes out to Voodoo's Envy 133, and don't EVER say it copied the MBA.
vlado08 - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
What are the next to steps?Are we going to see some day a Super AMOLED display in a ultrabook? Will it be capable of multisync refresh rate to watch moves at 23.976p 24p 25p 29,97p 59.94i .... 119.88p ... 240p? Can we have a decent sound? Or am I just dreaming?