Ultrabook sales cause boom in premium laptop sales

A research report from The NPD Group reveals that, despite a slightly shrinking market overall, ultrabooks have helped to boost sales of higher-end laptops. Partially due to their higher pricing and premium feature-set, ultrabooks have successfully accounted for 11 percent of all US PC and laptop sales throughout 2012.

This news comes as Deloitte released their Technology, Media & Telecommunications Predictions 2013 white paper, in which they analyse web traffic by device and by locality.

Deloitte predict a strong continuing trend for the laptop, although they predict similar trends for mobile devices, too. In countries where tablets and ultrabooks are already well-established (such as Singapore and the UK), between 10 and 12 percent of all traffic came from mobile devices. In India, where ultrabooks and tablets are experiencing slow sales but smartphones continue to surge, the proportion of mobile data coming from tablets or ultrabooks accounted for barely one percent of the nation’s web traffic.

All of this is to say that ultrabooks still have a lot of market to capture. Some companies are seeing this challenge as an opportunity. Among them are the founders of the ultrabook standard, Intel. “Ultrabooks are the future,” quoted the China Daily USA in an interview with Yang Xu, president of Intel China. Intel’s strict regulation of the term ‘ultrabook’ is credited by many commenters with causing price inflation in the category, as manufacturers attempt to align their product features with Intel’s demands. This pushes ultrabooks towards the ‘premium’ end of the market. Even the cheapest ultrabooks sit at around $700, a figure that Intel vowed to bring down at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas in January.

A second NPD report credits ultrabooks with reigniting consumer interest in premium laptops. Recent years have seen a growing gulf between the ‘budget’ laptop category and the mainly Apple-dominated ‘premium’ category. Ultrabooks, with their premium prices and innovative feature sets, have helped to put PCs back in the running at the high end. New developments in software – including Microsoft’s critically-acclaimed launch of Windows 8 – are helping to restore the sense of value PCs had begun to lose in the wake of the refined OS X machine. Ultrabooks offer many features that Apple does not – touch screens, flexible form-factors, NFC – and these are features that people are willing to pay for.

For existing ultrabook manufacturers, then, the path is clear. Next year’s great inventions – integration with motion sensing controllers such as the Leap Motion, WiDi hardware-level display streaming and ultrafast charging – are available to them now, unconstrained as they are by a religious release cycle (unlike the Palo Alto giant). And, in the meantime, they’re offering a range of devices that are genuinely capable of competing with Apple’s offerings – on equal financial terms.