ASUS Tips $600-900 Ultrabooks In April 2012 But Initial Pricing Rises

ASUS hasn't even got its UX21 ultrabook onto the market yet, but that hasn't stopped CEO Jerry Chen from talking about the ultraportables that will come after it. While the UX21 will be one of 5-6 notebooks ASUS expects to release in October this year, April 2012 will see $600 to $900 Ivy Bridge ultrabooks follow on, DigiTimes reports.

The initial batch will be targeted at the mid- to high-end of the notebook market, Chen suggests, and it'll be Q2 2012 before the entry-level gets some Ivy Bridge ultrabook love. That could well be a side-effect of what's tipped to be significantly high component pricing, already believed to have forced manufacturers to give their first-gen models higher prices – or accept lower profit margins – than they initially expected.

In fact, the initial ASUS ultrabooks will be $899 upwards, Chen now says, higher than recent reports of $799+. Ivy Bridge will bring 22nm production processes to the Sandy Bridge line-up, with an innovative 3D Tri-Gate design that, Intel reckons, will deliver performance boosts of up to 37-percent.

Intel has said it expects ultrabooks to account for 40-percent of all consumer laptop sales by the end of 2012, though Chen is not so confident. He expects the percentage to still languish below that, predicting that the newly-rebranded ultraportables will have a slow impact on the mainstream market.