Sales of Ultrabooks, the PC world’s “challenger” to Apple’s popular MacBook Air have fallen short. Shipments of the thin and light Windows laptops are falling significantly short of what Intel had hoped for.
CNET:
Ultrabook numbers will fall far short of Intel’s aggressive market share targets, an IDC analyst told CNET. The MacBook Air, meanwhile, continues to coast amid continued popularity. An IDC report today showed a weak PC market caught in its seventh consecutive quarter of little to no growth.
“The volume isn’t there and it’s going to be way below what Intel had hoped for,” IDC analyst Jay Chou told CNET, referring to ultrabooks.
“The first half [of 2012] is about 500,000 ultrabooks shipped worldwide. It’s nowhere near Intel’s initial hope,” Chou said. Ultrabooks are thin, lightweight Windows laptops that compete with Apple’s MacBook Air.
Intel had predicted at the first of the year that Ultrabooks could take 40 percent of the consumer laptop market.
“We might hit a million [ultrabooks] this year. The future really lies in 2013 and how well it jells with Windows 8,” Chou added.
IDC predicts about 225 million laptops to be shipped by the end of 2012. A million Ultrabooks would be a miniscule fraction of that market.
Unit shipments of Apple’s MacBooks were up in Q2 to about 2.8 million compared with 2.75 million in the same quarter last year.
