Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, writing for ZDNet:
Compromising on what an Ultrabook is supposed to be — especially this early in their lifecycle — does not bode well for the platform. To me, this feels like netbooks all over again, and it won’t be long before a promising platform is driven into the ground in an attempt to cost as many costs as possible.
And so begins the slow but inevitable death of the Ultrabook; death at the hands of a thousand cost cuts.
In case you aren’t familiar with Ultrabooks, they are a thin laptop specification from Intel based on, and meant to challenge, Apple’s MacBook Air line. Perhaps Intel bought the old idea of the “Apple Tax” and thought they could deliver a similar product at a lower price. They are finding out, when comparing equal specifications, that Apple has become almost unbeatably price competitive due to an ever dominating supply chain.
This all means the Ultrabook as originally envisioned is not feasible. In order to still deliver a product in the originally promised price range, Intel has now been forced to allow plastic casing. As Kingsley-Hughes notes, this compromise affects the one part of the product that people most intimately interact with - a part that largely made Apple’s MacBook Air an hit product.