Ultrabooks were the fashionable product to launch at CES this year. But the new Ultrabooks, meant to be PC competitors to the MacBook Air, seemed suspiciously fat. And heavy. And lacking in solid-state drives. Despite the dimensional and internal differences that place many of these notebooks a cut below the MacBook Air in portability, performance, and quality, they still qualify as Ultrabooks according to Intel's guidelines, suggesting to us that the guidelines need an overhaul.
Intel's official requirements for Ultrabooks are as follows: each model must have a configuration that falls below a $1,000 price point, notebooks with screens smaller than 14 inches must be thinner than 18 millimeters (14-inch-plus screen notebooks can be as thick as 21 millimeters), they must wake from hibernation in no more than 7 seconds, and they must have a minimum 5 hours of battery life, as measured by MobileMark 2007. An obvious flaw with these guidelines: there are no weight requirements, in spite of the importance of light weight to portability. Unsurprisingly, weight is a problem for several models.
In the latter half of 2011, these few guidelines produced Ultrabooks that, at least in internals and form factor, were gunning for the MacBook Air's crown: Asus produced 11-inch and 13-inch models, and Toshiba and Acer each produced 13-inch models, all of which were incredibly thin and light (2.5-3 pounds) but still packed respectable processors and solid state drives.
But as the second generation of Ultrabooks rolled around early this year, few companies have attempted a highly ultraportable performance notebook. Dell was the notable exception, with its 13-inch screen notebook that has a "footprint similar to 11-inch products", and Acer showed the 13-inch Aspire S5 that improved on its predecessor, the Aspire S3. But in a market where 13- and 15-inch screens dominate, 14-inch screen sizes proved unusually popular among the Ultrabook models announced at CES, and some were described as fitting into "13-inch bodies."
Many companies pulled this trick, and it's not just because they decided notebooks should be smaller. Becky Emmett, consumer PR manager at Intel, clarified for Ars that "screen size is screen size" when it comes to the Ultrabook rules, which we suspect is why we saw a number of notebooks claiming to have a "14-inch screen in a 13-inch body"—the bigger screen gives it that extra thickness allowance. Until the 18-millimeter/21-millimeter thickness distinction in Intel's Ultrabook guidelines, remarkably few companies felt the need to compress the body size of 14-inch notebooks.
This kind of loophole produces Ultrabooks like the HP Envy 14 Spectre, which has a 14-inch screen "in a 13-inch body", but weighs 3.79 pounds and measures 20 millimeters thick. That's on the small side for a 14-inch laptop, but nearly 4 pounds is pushing it for an ultraportable computer.
Some of the 14-inch Ultrabooks get a resolution bump along with screen size: the Spectre has a 1600x900 screen, as does Lenovo’s IdeaPad Yoga. But many are no more than supersized 13-inch screens, with 1366x768 resolutions, such as Samsung’s 14-inch Series 5 Ultra.
The other all-too-common point of compromise comes out of the 7-second wake time. The ostensible way to achieve that seven seconds while keeping costs down would be to include a small 64GB or 128GB SSD, but many manufacturers have chosen instead to take advantage of hybrid storage technology, using setups like a flash memory cache in combination with an HDD to boost speeds. Hybrid drives first stumbled onto the scene in 2007, but the technology only recently matured enough for common use.
Their new popularity is not without reason: tests show they can match SSDs in many tasks, and importantly to Ultrabooks, both hybrid drives and discrete flash caches can rival SSDs' startup times. However, they can't match SSDs for sustained random data access or transfer rates. Worse for an Ultrabook, an HDD is typically larger than an SSD and has moving parts, handicapping the small size and stability of a traveling notebook.
The recent crop of Ultrabooks do manage to have great battery lives. For example, the 14-inch Lenovo IdeaPad U410 is advertised as getting up to 8 hours from its battery. It also weighs 4.19 pounds, is exactly 21 millimeters thick, and comes with a 500GB HDD supplemented by a flash memory cache.
All of the notebooks mentioned here follow Intel's rules to a T, yet are entirely unlike MacBook Air competitors. Some of the larger models with better specifications may give the mythical 15-inch MacBook Air a run for its money, but little is being offered right now under the Ultrabook moniker in the way of highly portable, high-performance notebooks. We almost feel bad for Intel, that so much of the Ultrabook spirit has been lost in strict interpretations of its design guidelines; companies can benefit from the Ultrabook name and funding without accelerating the development of notebooks much at all. They might have dared to make heavy 0.8-inch thick notebooks with HDDs without Intel's extra motivation.
The question is whether Intel can establish stricter guidelines that constrain maximum weight and mandate solid state storage. Would an elevated standard be too difficult for hardware manufacturers to meet? We don't think so: as we said earlier, the first crop of Ultrabooks went above and beyond the guidelines, and for all their faults—middling-quality keyboards, and design quirks—they came closer to competing with the MacBook Air than this new crop.
Are these companies evil for offering notebooks with larger screens and faster startup times in bodies that are smaller and lighter than last year's models? No, these machines are a definitely an improvement. But are they moving in on the MacBook Air's market share and giving PC users a viable MacBook Air alternative? Not really. We might have guessed that, at worst, the "Ultrabook" movement was going to produce little more than a marketing term. Perhaps naively, we were hoping for better.
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