Ultrabooks, tablets vie for market dominance

Peter Dinham
Wednesday, 25 January 2012 15:18

IT Industry - Market

Global shipments of ultrabooks are predicted to grow at three times the rate of tablets over the next five years, but despite the strong growth, tablet volumes will remain higher with a forecast of 253 million to be shipped in 2016 compared with 178 million ultrabooks.

In its latest market report, Juniper Research, says that while vendors have quickly responded to Apple's launch of the iPad with an array of competing products, the industry has been slow to respond to 2008’s Macbook Air, and leading vendors only launched the first Ultrabooks – a new category in mobile computing driven by the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer, Intel – late last year.

According to Juniper, while the market is bursting with new products post-CES, a number of challenges remain for the industry. “As we have seen in the tablet market, without products which are significantly differentiated from those of Apple in terms of price and features, gaining traction for its competitors is a difficult value proposition. Furthermore, Intel's Ultrabook specs bring their own challenges, report author Daniel Ashdown said.

Ashdown cautions that while Intel's control of the brand ensures that Ultrabooks stand out from traditional notebooks, “vendors face a balancing act in terms of product strategy.” 

“Meeting Intel's specification secures brand status and funding, but the step-change from notebooks means many of today's Ultrabooks are too expensive for many consumers," Ashdown emphasises.

Other key findings from the Juniper report include: 

•    Flash-based storage – behind many of the enhancements in Ultrabooks – provides superior performance, which comes at a price, but vendors will need to augment solid state drives with hard disk drives or cloud storage in the long term.

•    Windows 8 will play a pivotal role in driving Ultrabook adoption, with extended battery life, always-on-always-connected and other functionalities coming with Microsoft's next OS.

•    Netbooks shipments will comprise just a third of today's volumes by 2016, as tablets and low-cost, but superior performance notebooks continue to cannibalise this short-lived segment.

The Ultrabooks whitepaper is available to download from the Juniper website together with further details of the full study.