Avalanche of Ultrabooks: up to 50 will be announced at CES

November 18, 2011 By Mike Dunn

The Consumer Electronics Association is predicting that between 30 and 50 Ultrabooks will be launched at this year's CES in Las Vegas.

If you have been dying for some more Ultrabooks to hit the market than we have some amazing news for you. There could be as many and 50 Ultrabooks launched at January’s CES. The Consumer Electronics Association expepts to see between 30 and 50 Ultrabooks to be debuted at the show.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini is scheduled to make a keynote speech in Las Vegas during the conference at which time he is expected to announce a new more powerful 22 nanometer Ivy Bridge processor. It is rumored that this processor will be the brain of all the newly launched Ultrabooks during the show.

Currently there are only a handful of Ultrabooks on the market, even though everyone seems to be excited about Ultrabooks sales are not meeting expectations. Sales numbers for early Ultrabooks are one third of what were expected, and might be a bad omen for the coming surge of skinny laptops.

Just because so many Ultrabooks will be launched does not mean that they will be a success. Last year over 100 new tablets were launched at CES, all trying to unseat Apple’s iPad, and for the most part those tablets have failed to make a sizeable dent in the iPad’s market share. In 2010 the big product was 3D TV, and those still haven’t become popular yet.

Ultrabooks promise to be thinner, lighter, and last longer than other laptops, but only time will tell if they will live up to their potential. With the increasing popularity of Apple’s Macbook Air it seems likely that Ultrabooks will also find an audience, but ultimately consumers will decide what they want.

Showing 4 comments

Mike Marra at 8:57am 20th November 2011 Blu- ray is going to last for at leaast another decade. Optical discs on a LAPTOP arenot necassary. Just buy an extra dics burner and hook it up.
James D. Dunn at 1:51am 19th November 2011 IF any of them have 3D cards that can play Elder Scrolls V Skyrim, insta-buy.
memexe@gmail.com at 7:53pm 18th November 2011 Good! Let the competition begin! My "powerhouse" is a desktop. I only need a light fairly loaded windows based system on the go. As for the missing disk drive... the optical disk is dying! You'll see your movies on flash cards rather than on blueray disk in the next years.
Eric J. Nelson at 6:56pm 18th November 2011 I find ultrabooks interesting, but ultimately a niche segment. The biggest turn off for the average consumer will be the lack of an optical drive. In my workplace I've had many people who were considering buying a netbook opt against it for that very reason.