Taiwanese interested in buying a new lightweight laptop will be spoilt for choice in the next few months as five companies are planning to launch a total of seven ultrabook models by the end of December.
Ultrabooks from Asustek Computer Inc (華碩), Acer Inc (宏碁), Hewlett-Packard Co (HP), Toshiba Corp and Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想) will start hitting local stores in mass volumes during the fourth quarter, according to Intel Taiwan’s country manager Jason Chen (陳立生).
“Taiwan will be among the first markets to sell ultrabooks,” he told reporters yesterday at an ultrabook promotional press event.
“The consumer reception to ultrabooks here is better than expected,” he added.
Ultrabooks refer to a set of laptops built to be slim, light and powerful, yet very affordable.
The project is backed by Intel Corp, which is pumping in US$300 million in venture capital funds to help PC companies develop this new breed of machines.
Acer has taken the lead to debut the first slew of ultrabooks in Taiwan.
The company last week announced the Aspire S3, which comes with a 13.3-inch LED screen, measures 1.3cm in thickness, weighs less than 1.4kg and has a battery life of up to seven hours.
The price tag starts at NT$35,000 (US$1,142).
One of the unique selling points is that Acer’s ultrabooks offer users a choice of either hard disk drives or solid state drives (SSD), chief marketing officer Scott Lin (林顯郎) said last week.
As much as 90 percent of its ultrabook models will offer hard disk drives, compared to most other makers that offer only SSDs, he said.
SSDs are faster than hard disk drives, but are more expensive.
Toshiba is set to release two models in Taiwan and Japan simultaneously late next month.
Their prices start at NT$37,000.
The machines have 13.3-inch screens and come equipped with a 128GB SSD, according to Chien Chun-hao (錢俊豪), marketing manager of Grainnex Corp (新禾), which retails Toshiba’s products in Taiwan.
“If we reduce the price tags to lower than NT$30,000 through using low-end specifications, those products are less likely to win over Taiwanese users. We tailor our products on each market’s needs,” he said.
Wistron Corp (緯創), Taiwan’s third-largest contract maker of notebooks for brands like HP, Dell Inc and Acer, said ultrabook shipments are expected to account for more than 20 percent of its total notebook shipments during the first half of next year.
“Consumers [have] shifted [their] budgets to tablet PCs, because notebooks offer no new excitement to spur demand,” Wistron president Robert Hwang (黃柏漙) said on Monday.
“[Microsoft Corp’s new operating system] Windows 8 and ultrabooks may change that,” he added.
Taiwanese notebook makers are eager to increase sales, as their third-quarter shipments appeared to be lackluster.
Barclays Capital said on Monday that it expected notebook shipments from Taiwan’s top-tier contract makers to have grown 5 percent quarter-on-quarter in the third quarter, which is much lower than the five-year average of more than 25 percent growth quarter-on-quarter.
This was because of the very weak back-to-school demand and overall global economic uncertainty, it said.
Additional reporting by CNA
Apple Inc increased iPhone production in India by about 53 percent last year and now makes a quarter of its marquee devices there, reflecting the US company’s efforts to avoid tariffs on China. The company assembled about 55 million iPhones in India last year, up from 36 million a year earlier, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named because the numbers aren’t public. Apple makes about 220 million to 230 million iPhones a year globally, with India’s share of the total increasing rapidly. Apple has accelerated its expansion in the world’s most populous country in recent years, bolstered
HEADWINDS: The company said it expects its computer business, as well as consumer electronics and communications segments to see revenue declines due to seasonality Pegatron Corp (和碩) yesterday said it aims to grow its artificial intelligence (AI) server revenue more than 10-fold this year from last year, driven by orders from neocloud solutions clients and large cloud service providers. The electronics manufacturing service provider said AI server revenue growth would be driven primarily by the Nvidia Corp GB300 server platform. Server shipments are expected to increase each quarter this year, with the second half likely to outperform the first half, it said. The AI server market is expected to broaden this year as more inference applications emerge, which would drive demand for system-on-chip, application-specific integrated circuits
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) share of the global foundry market rose to almost 70 percent last year amid booming demand for artificial intelligence (AI), market information advisory firm TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said on Thursday. The contract chipmaker posted US$122.54 billion in revenue, up 36.1 percent from a year earlier, accounting for 69.9 percent of the global market, TrendForce said. Its share was up from 64.4 percent in 2024, it said. TSMC’s closest rival, Samsung Electronics, was a distant second, posting US$12.63 billion in sales, down 3.9 percent from a year earlier, for a 7.2 percent share of the global market. In the
At a massive shipyard in North Vancouver, Canadian workers grind metal beams for a powerful new icebreaker crucial to cementing the country’s presence in the increasingly contested arctic. Icebreakers are specialized, expensive vessels able to navigate in the frozen far north. And “this is the crown jewel,” said Eddie Schehr, vice president of production at the Seaspan shipyard. For Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who heads to Norway next Friday to observe arctic defense drills involving troops from 14 NATO states, Canada’s extreme north has emerged as a strategic priority. “Canada is and forever will be an Arctic nation,” he said ahead of
RSS