Ultrabooks have started to become popular alternatives to regular laptops due to its thin and slim form factor, and the fact that most Ultrabooks come bundled with speedy SSDs versus regular HDDs found on normal laptops. However Ultrabooks tend to be priced at the higher-end of the market, meaning that customers who don’t see the point in paying $999 for a laptop will not buy one. However according to Intel at the Intel Solutions Summit, Kirk Skaugen, the senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s PC Client Group came out and said that we might be able to look forward to $599 Ultrabooks entering the market this holiday season.
These $599 Ultrabooks are expected to be built on Intel’s Haswell chipset, making it more affordable, but apparently more feature-rich compared to current generation devices. Intel’s reference Haswell model is expected to come with a high-res touchscreen display, speedier SSDs, voice recognition and facial recognition, and best of all, “all-day” battery life which we guess is definitely subject to testing and will vary from user to user. However we have to wonder if dropping the price down to $599, will OEMs have to sacrifice premium materials in favor of plastic (i.e. the Samsung Series 9 uses aluminum for its chassis)?
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