The holiday season has been a particularly sweet pie for Apple as it sold the most devices through the season. Even the pricey MacBook Air, one of the priciest products by Apple, witnessed an overall sales of 1.2 million during the holidays. This makes the December quarter the highest-sales quarter for MacBook Air as Apple sold 200,000 more MacBook Airs in the December quarter compared to the September quarter. The update on MacBook Air is that Apple will soon be introducing in them, Intel’s next-gen Ivy Bridge processors.
Although MacBook Air is still leading the ultrabook market, many new competitors are emerging to cash on this lucrative niche. A notable one among them is Acer. Acer has recently take the opportunity of CES 2012 to launch it’s own Aspire S5 Ultrabook. It is the thinnest ultrabook in the world, thinner than even Apple’s MacBook Air. Macbook Air is 17-mm thick while Aspire S5 is 15 mm thick and weighs less than three pounds.
What can be a tough spot for Apple is that according to analysts, the new emerging Ultrabook producers, such as Acer, Lenovo and Toshiba, will produce notebooks with the same high-end specs as Apple. But they will most probably keep their costs low, at least $50 or $100 less than the prices at which Apple is offering it’s products. Although there’s no surety that this strategy will succeed, they may create a dent in Apple’s profits if they indeed provide a product which is excellent enough but in a lesser price.
Image courtesy Benjamin Nagel.
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