Think tablets are selling like hot cupcakes? Check out Ultrabooks, those super-thin laptops that look like the MacBook Air. According to Juniper Research, shipments of these devices will grow at three times the rate of tablets over the next five years. However, tablets volume will remain higher, with 253 million shipped in 2016, compared with 178 million Ultrabooks.
The problem the industry faces is how to differentiate its offering from Apple in terms of price and features. The report author Daniel Ashdown says that 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,” he added.
Other findings from the report include:
- Flash-based storage 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 and other functionalities coming with Microsoft’s next OS.
- Netbook shipments will comprise just a third of today’s volumes by 2016, as tablets and low-cost, but superior performance notebooks continue to cannibalize the segment.
And you can get additional information from Juniper’s website.