The Macalope hates to be the one to break it to you. But Ultrabooks aren’t doing so well. Like, really not doing so well.
The Macalope doesn’t want to say sales of Ultrabooks so far this year have stunk, but the ISO standard for this number actually requires him to say they stunk, or else Macworld will be out of ISO compliance. And we wouldn’t want that.
If that were a real thing that websites did.
“The first half [of 2012] is about 500,000 ultrabooks shipped worldwide. It’s nowhere near Intel’s initial hope,” IDC analyst Jay Chou said.
500,000 is … not a lot.
From the picture of an Ultrabook in the piece, it’s not surprising that people aren’t interested in buying what looks like a MacBook Air with a bunch of VGA ports and crap soldered onto the side. Which you might think is just the Macalope trash-talking Ultrabooks, but that’s actually the entirety of the Intel Ultrabook spec: “Should look like a MacBook Air with a bunch of VGA ports and crap soldered onto the side.”
See, this low sales number is odd, though, because (yes, the Macalope has done this fake surprise thing so many times now that he can do it in his sleep, but let’s do this one more time) it seems like just last year the Macalope was hearing about how 2012 will be “The year of the Ultrabook!”
“Why 2012 Will be the Year of the Ultrabook”
Just like that! That’s exactly what the Macalope was talking about! What a timely link! How does that happen?!
Now, this piece by Christina Bonnington for Wired from last November may have been the victim of a drive-by headlining, because the body itself is more reasonable. But it certainly was the case that the PC industry was hoping for a break-out hit with knock-off MacBook Airs and so far, let’s see, hmmm, noooooooooo.
Worldwide PC shipments were flat in the second quarter in 2012 according to Gartner (tip o’ the antlers to the Loop) and, in the U.S., only Apple was up among the major vendors.
Of course, if you include iPads …
Sorry, that’s silly! Why would anyone do that?!
[Editors’ Note: In addition to being a mythical beast, the Macalope is not an employee of Macworld. As a result, the Macalope is always free to criticize any media organization. Even ours.]