Windows 8 is Microsoft’s extremely belated answer to the iPad and iOS, and while Microsoft’s slowness in this regard has cost it and its OEM partners heavily, thanks to burgeoning iPad and tablet sales, the Microsoft empire is finally about to strike back.
Ultrabooks, the MacBook Air clones that have arrived FIVE freakin’ years after Apple popularised the wafter thin, nearly razor sharp designs – and despite companies like Toshiba making ultrabook-esque models years earlier – simply HAVEN’T saved the PC industry.
Unfortunately for ultrabooks, they had to come out at a time when Windows 8 wasn’t yet ready, which meant that many who have been hearing about Windows 8’s very touching new capabilities have simply decided to save their hard-earned dollars and wait for ultrabook/tablet hybrids to arrive as well.
In addition, Microsoft’s Surface tablet can’t be helping matters much either, seeing as it makes many Ultrabooks seem so, well, 2011, or even, 2007.
Even CNET in the US is suggesting that Ultrabooks buyers aren’t buying because they know that Windows 8 has its beautiful yet boxy Metro touch interface, and it’ll only be touchable with a touch-screen.
This is just plain ol’ common sense – and even Intel knows it, with 40 touch-screen ultrabook/tablet hybrid designs “in the pipeline”.
Look – not everyone WANTS a touch screen, and for those people, traditional laptops and lightweight ultrabooks do the job perfectly.
However, in a world that has become ever more touching since 2007, and then since 2010’s iPad introduction, people not only want to be touched by their computers deep within, they want to touch back in an interactive manner.
No touch screen means no direct interaction with your digital world – only one that relies on trackpads or mice for a “once removed” experience that was good enough pre-today, but is not good enough for tomorrow.
Tomorrow’s where we’re all travelling, so unless you want to be stuck in MC Hammer’s world where “you can’t touch this”, non-touch ultrabooks are dead. Dead. DEAD!
(...and for those who couldn't care less about touch, these non-touch Ultrabooks will soon be cheap. Cheap. CHEAPER than ever, but probably not as cheap as you'd prefer until... late this year and early next.)
