Ultrabook: Intel's $300 million plan to beat Apple at its own game

Riiiiight, Apple’s marketing plan is to take a successful and strongly differentiated product and then say it is interchangeable with its competitors' products. Actually, they will say it is inferior because it lacks goodies like VGA ports.

Joel Spolsky wrote a long time ago that companies like to commoditize their complements[1]. Apple wants to commoditize the CPUs and the applications, Intel wants to commoditize tablets and notebooks. Intel is going to fight like a dog in a cage to get people to think that notebooks are all pretty much the same, provided there’s an “Intel Inside” sticker plastered on the case.

Apple is not going to play along, period. Instead, they are busy trying to get people to ignore the bits and pieces inside. How much RAM is in an iPhone? Who makes it?? How fast is the CPU? Apple is working hard to make these questions irrelevant for mobile devices, and Intel’s behaviour is going to encourage them to do the same in notebooks.

I don’t see this article as being about Apple vs. the cloners. I see this article as being about Intel vs. the entire notebook manufacturing sector, with Apple being the biggest target.

[1]: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html

Apple doesn't sell spec sheets. They sell end-to-end integrated systems. A 7 second boot time doesn't mean as much when it gets me to a relentless stream of "the webpage you're at wants to open a webpage you trust - are you sure?" and other user-unfriendly operations. Total experience sells. The iPad is beating the pants of tablets with twice the specs - but half the user experience.

Intel is aiming at where Apple is now. When Intel arrives there, Apple will have moved on. Don't build what I want, build what I'm going to want a year after I buy it a year from now.

And for that $300M plan, Apple has $30,000M cash to counter it. Get in the right order of magnitude first before picking a fight.

Intel is scared about Apple becoming the dominant PC maker, especially because Apple has been using non-Intel chips in their new premier products (iPad and iPhone). My guess is that Apple's next big move is to start selling something in the laptop space that uses either the A5 processor or the next generation of it, which I guess would be called the A6. This will be huge. Intel processors are major power hogs and there's no way they can make them significantly better. Apple is poised to release a laptop with the Air's form factor that runs iOS on an A5 or A6 that Apple manufactures.

This could be an absolute coup if it happens. They will be selling something like the 11" Mac Air for between $600 and $700, possibly less. It would have sick battery life that nobody could touch. It will run all of the iPad apps, have Safari and all of Apple's Office replacement software. The best part is that nobody could compete with it, because the only way would be to also ditch Intel's x86 processor, but there's no other OS or developer ecosystem that could run on it. Maybe Android on an ARM processor. Microsoft has nothing lined up in this space. They are dead in the water.

The best part is that you don't need Jobs to make this happen. What you need is the manufacturing knowledge and capacity that someone like Cook can deliver.

My cousin was just looking at laptops -- most she'll pay is $400. Even $799 is a luxury machine. Apple skims the users who are willing to pay more for intangibles. The PC market just isn't flush with users who want to pay $1000 for a laptop -- regardless of battery life and form factor. Just ask Dell and it's 10mm Adamo, which may have sold more poorly than the JooJoo.

When buying a Macbook, I know I'll be able to get parts and service for it - often from a local Apple store - for several years. If I buy a Dell N5040 today, and need service for it 2 years from now, will I be able to get it? Dell's got a reputation for good service for businesses, but that's because they're paying a lot extra for service contracts and such.

Looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Inspiron then looking at http://www.dell.com/us/p/inspiron-laptops - I don't see some of the Dell models on the Wikipedia site (granted, they may not be 100% up to date all the time) but I also see a long litany of model variations, none of which inspire much confidence in me. With all the differing parts that change between models, will Dell even be able to get the same parts for my model in, say, 3 years?

Some of this is just trust in the brand - I know Apple's changed their macbook lineup several times, but rarely enough to warrant an entirely new name change - usually just spec upgrades. There's a certain amount of trust I and many other friends seem to have in Apple because of the simplicity of the product line. Yes, it's better for Apple as well, to streamline cost/operations, but from my standpoint simpler == less cognitive dissonance. I say this as someone who grew tired of building my own desktops years ago, speccing out parts (and trying to find linux drivers for them during my linux years), and have gone more mobile. There's usually far less "build it yourself" in the laptop world, so you go with what's available from manufacturers. Apple's models have a consistency between them and over time which builds confidence in the brand itself, not just any one particular model.

Trying to compete on specs with new models being introduced quarter to quarter will not work - Apple competitors need to rethink their long term strategy if they want to win back customers. I still run Windows sometimes, but I don't need a dedicated Windows machine from HP/Lenovo/Dell to do it on, and I'm not sure what would ever get me back to that camp.

Would I pay a 'premium' price for a Lenovo? Possibly, but there's gotta be a bigger faith in the brand, and I don't have that right now.

In the 80s, Apple was dominant in the GUI space. Windows 3.1 put a huge dent in this. By the time Windows 95 came out, Apple was essentially dead.

During all this, Intel and Microsoft had an uneasy marriage of convenience. They were dependent on each other but had clear lines of separation between hardware and software.

Microsoft tried to branch out. The original versions of NT ran on other architectures, like Alpha and MIPS. Under Steve Jobs (many may remember that Steve Jobs was only interim CEO for years after the NeXT purchase while the Apple board searched for a replacement for Gil Amelio).

5+ years ago, with a resurgent Apple in the PC space, Apple abandoned Motorla for Intel, killing the PowerPC in all but name. Microsoft had long since abandoned all the non-x86 architectures.

Intel was so dominant that they sold their low-power chip division (XScale) and seemed to have an answer for low cost computer devices in the form of the Atom as the netbook market just exploded.

Intel basically discounted any device smaller than this. So did Microsoft. Apple completely transformed the mobile space with the iPhone and then the iPad, catapulting ARM from a niche embedded product to something eating away at Intel from the bottom end, potentially threatening their entire business.

In the 90s the churn of forced obsolescence made MS and Intel a lot of money and solved a lot of problems. There were no old versions of Windows to support as the market for PCs was growing at a huge rate and hardware just didn't last that long.

Now the CPU power that the average user needs has plateaued. Any PC made in the last 5 years (maybe longer) will be fine for most people. The trend now is towards lower power and more mobility, which is why ARM is a strategic threat to Intel.

It's incredibly funny ("the ironing is delicious" as Bart would say) that Apple is now one of Intel's biggest customers while being the driver to the threat to Intel.

And now Microsoft, once an unstoppable juggernaut, just doesn't get it when Ballmer describes tablets as "just another form factor". They failed for 10 years to make tablets just another way to sell more Windows licenses. They're still kicking that dead horse with Windows 8.

All the while Apple is making money hand over fist and HP, Dell, etc are struggling to make a buck or, in HP's case, getting out of the PC business entirely.

All of these companies try to imitate Apple releasing vaguely copycat products but none of them get it. They're engaged in what I call "shotgun marketing" as they have no idea what the market wants and just fire off a shotgun blast, hoping something will stick.

Only Apple seems willing or able to put the consumer first. The Apple-haters will I'm sure violently disagree with some or all of this.

Microsoft I believe will continue a very long but now inevitable slide into irrelevance (companies that large take many years to die). The jury is still out on Intel.

The only companies that seem to have a long future ahead of them are Apple, Google and maybe Facebook.

In regards to this Brit, it sounds like his only option is to just keep using his Thinkpad if he wants to stay happy. Such inflexibility.

Give me a tower I can hook up to a 1080p TV, give someone a million dollars to create a lap board that doesn't suck, and give me a wireless kbm to set on a desk somewhere in case I want that experience.

Also, give me a wireless touch monitor, that can double as a tablet in the house, or even a smart remote for my home entertainment system. Maybe even let me access my data over wifi... But that's just aiming high for a first generation product. Anecdotal evidence tells me most ipad owners don't even take them out that often.

And if I can think of this, someone at these companies can think of something even better than "follow the leader."

On the first page, the author complains about having to type 'our' instead of 'or' for some British spellings, key mapping requirements, inclusion of the TouchPad but exclusion of a TrackPoint (keyboard nipple), Macbooks not having dedicated home/end/page up/down keys (which is just function + each arrow key, and should not really require four extra dedicated buttons), Bootcamp not being good enough to run multiple versions of Windows, etc...

I can't speak to the # symbol being on a different key, but the author complains about not having the return key taking 3 spots instead of two. And framing that as some kind of US-centric thing!

Plenty of keyboards designed for the US use a giant return key, and others do not. It's a design and user choice issue which optimizes for space, not some conscious US-centric, ignoring-international-design-standards type of decision.

Dell, with the purchase of Alienware and with its in-house XPS brand, and HP, which bought VoodooPC, have both tried to carve out premium niches. At one time or another, both of these bought-in brands were producing gaming-oriented hardware. Though this makes some sense—PC gamers tend to have relatively high hardware demands, and so aren't going to be satisfied by bargain basement prices—but it also leaves the products marginalized, with styling that's not exactly mainstream (especially in Dell's case) and website promotion that leaves them segregated.

This is so true. I want a good looking laptop that doesn't look like a Macbook. Gaming laptops are horrible, but I want the features.

HP has some reasonable looking laptops, and so does Samsung, but both fall into the "make a nice case then cover it with stickers" thing. I realize they get paid for it, but please! I'd pay $50 for no stickers...

This ultra books are meant to compete against tablets which are growing quite fast and where intel has no solution yet afaik, I say take that 300 million dollars and invest in even more efficient and powerful architectures that could be placed in tablets and smartphones!

Maybe throw all those resources at innovating?

But they might have chased this model for a more complex reason than "all these companies are idiots."

Maybe OEMs found, with the ubiquity of components, that if they don't compete with customization, they invite competition from homebuilt PCs, or PCs built and shipped out of some guy's basement. Maybe they're walking an awkward tightrope which Apple avoids by making its own OS.

http://shop.lenovo.com/us/notebooks/thinkpad/t-series/t420s

Don't interrupt, it's on a website, it must make sense somehow.

http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/simplicity_is_highly_overrated.htm...

(summary: people buy things with more knobs and lights because the illusion of control gives them the impression that it is more powerful)

My Toshiba Satellite has five LEDs in a row on the front. Three of them are on continuously (one turns orange, I think, when it sleeps). One represents hard disk activity, though Task Manager's I/O graph is vastly more useful. One of them has never turned on. I have no idea what it's for. It has an icon above it that sort of looks like a piece of paper. I'm sure someone at Toshiba thought it was a good idea to forgo the anti-reflective screen coating in favor of a few more LEDs. "Consumers will love all the extra power afforded by the paper-light!" he said.