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Comment by Tichy | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why people don't like Ultrabooks. They like MacBook Airs, so what's wrong about creating slim and lightweight notebooks in general?

That some vendors produce crap is irrelevant. But there are nice offerings out there.

I've seen a Samsung in the shop recently that looked and felt great. They only screwed it up in offering max 4GB RAM and their lineup is so confusing that I don't even know which one I would have to look at online. But that is not a general issue of "Ultrabooks".

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My problem with ultrabooks is what is intel doing with the brand. At first, ultrabooks were supposed to be laptops with good battery life, high-resolution IPS screen and a SSD. Also it should be thin, which I think is meaningless, but whatever.

However, it seems that this disappeared somewhere, and now laptop with 1366*786 15" TN screen and rotary storage (with a measly 16 GB "SSD cache" that does pretty much nothing to make it faster), but it is required to have Windows 8 and touchscreen.

The brand lost meaning, it went from "Apple quality from someone else than Apple" (so we can buy nice computer without supporting walled garden approach)

I was never under the impression that I could just buy any notebook that has an Ultrabook sticker and get the equivalent to an MBA. So I guess I don't really care about the brand - I care about getting a lightweight, powerful notebook.

You do realize you can install whatever you want on a Mac, right?

I will check back on this comment 5 years from now to see if that still holds true

So many developers use Macs now that I would be surprised if Apple went this direction. I'm sure they want to go this direction--I'm just not sure they feel like they can without angering developers.

To be fair, all OS companies (Apple, Google, and Microsoft) want to go this direction. It would probably be enough to push me back onto Linux.

I do, but I still don't like their approach on iOS, don't like the idea of them doing the same thing with OS X (which they might or might not do), and would rather give my money to some different company.

This is rather hard, though, we'll see how Haswell Zenbooks will fare. Or maybe XPS 13's

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