Remember how ultrabooks were supposed to kill the MacBook Air? It looks as if that isn’t turning out so well. In Q2 only 500,000 ultrabooks were shipped while 2.8 million MacBooks were sold. And while that number includes MacBook Pros, a large chunk of those sales were MacBook Airs as well. Because of this, we can assume that MacBook Airs are completely outselling PC ultrabooks.
IDC analyst Jay Chou expects only 1 million ultrabooks to be sold by the end of the year — this isn’t much considering IDC also expects 225 million laptops to be sold this year. This isn’t nearly as much as Intel, the creator of the “ultrabook standards”, wanted either. Intel expected ultrabooks to cover at least 40 percent of the notebook marketshare.
As a whole, the PC market fell 0.1 percent last quarter, while Mac sales rose 4.3 percent over quarter one. To me, Windows 8 needs to work out extremely well for ultrabooks in order for it to succeed. However, with the rise of Windows “Metro” and hybrid tablets, we may not see ultrabooks take off like Intel and Microsoft want them to. But now that you’ve heard my opinion, let’s hear yours. Leave us a comment telling us what you think of Windows 8 ultrabooks and if you think they can catch up to the MacBook Air.
