Ultra Thin Laptop --This Years Hot Laptop?The ultra thin laptop is the hoped to be hot computer for this school and holiday season. Bigger than netbooks and lighter than most laptops, they perform in the middle too. At leastIntel and the OEMS like HP and Dell hope they're hot. For the first two quarters of 2009 all the news reports say 25% of the processors Intel has shipped have been Intel Atom processors. These only account for 8% of Intel profits from processors. This is a very low profit margin. Unless you are deliberately underpricing a product to gain market share, and expect to be able to jack the price up when you have no competitors, you would like to have 25% of sales account for 25% of profits. Intel sells Atom processors on a motherboard with integrated sound and graphics. They've fought against allowing any other choices. This basically forces all the OEMS to charge the same price for their net books. They can't put something a little bit different in and charge more. You're just seeing designer net books and different flavors of unix. Everything I have seen unabashedly says that Intel (and the OEMs) want to sell the Consumer Ultra-Low Voltage chips and platform because they have a higher profit margin than net books, the current hot product. This is bad for you. Higher profit margin means more of your money is going to line someone else's pockets. Just like last year with net books, you are being sold less performance. Net books are small, extremely portable, fast enough to do the things most people do most of the time, have relatively long battery life but have smaller displays and keyboards. They really aren't suitable for gaming and don't have optical drives. An ultra thin laptop with the Intel Consumer Ultra Low voltage processor is a little smaller and lighter than current ultra portable laptops, fast enough to do the things most people do most of the time, are alleged to have a longer battery life than ultraportable laptops, have full size keyboards and displays that are larger than net books. They aren't suitable for gaming either. All ultra thin laptops do not have internal optical drives (CD/DVD burners). You are to be sold less for more. You will pay more for a considerbly slower but lighter computer as compared to a mainstream laptop. As compared to an ultra portable, an ultra thin will be slower,a little lighter. Makers will claim better battery life. As I have said, most people do not play new, top end games on their computers. Most people do not do extensive editing of video on their computers. I read what could best be described as a writer for an allegedly unbiased, technically oriented publication shilling for ultra thin laptops. This writer enouraged people to buy ultra thin laptops because most people surf the net, down load music, e-mail and run a few Microsoft Office or equivalent applications on their computers and do little else. These people do not need the speed and power of the current laptops, they should pay more for a slower, but marginally lighter laptop that might have better battery life. Remember though, net books use even less power, but they put smaller batteries in them so the battery life isn't as good as it could be. If a netbook is about the equivalent in performance to a 5 to 7 year old near top end laptop, the performance of an ultra thin laptop is about the equivalent of one 3 to 5 years old. Both are fast enough to surf the net, down load music, e-mail and run a few Microsoft Office or equivalent applications. The laptop will come closer to running new higher end games but any ultra thin with a video card good enough to run these well would lose most of any battery life advantage it might have and run quite hot. I would expect a lot of burn outs unless there is a break through in cooling technology A gamer who is insisting on buying a laptop needs a high end mainstream laptop preferably with a 17inch or larger display. The "most people" I describe above can use either net books, the new ultra thin latops, the older thin and light (or ultra portable) notebooks or mainstream laptops. This listing ranks these types in increasing potential performance. You still don't get a "performance" video card in net books, ultra thin laptops or ultra portable (thin and lght) laptops. The processors I've seen in the ultra thin laptops are about the same speed as the processors in ths laptops Walmart and Best Buy have been selling recently for $300 or less. I won't say don't buy an ultra thin laptop, but you should know that unless a little bit of less weight is worth it to you your paying a lot.
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