Been admiring the speedy and svelte Ultrabook form factor but not the pricetag? That's all set to change today, with Acer offering the first Ultrabook in Australia below $1,000.
When Intel announced the
Ultrabook specification back in May, we were promised a "family of products [with] thin, light and beautiful designs that are less than 20mm thick, and mainstream price points under US$1,000." Unfortunately, for Australian users at least, while we've certainly seen some groundbreakingly thin/light/beautiful (and powerful) machines gracing store shelves recently, that bit about the target pricing must have gone astray somewhere along the production line, with Ultrabooks locally fetching up to $2,000 and mid-range models hovering around $1,500 (even the cheapest units have tended to cost more
than this).
Cue: watershed moment. Today Acer announced that its Aspire S3 line, the
first Ultrabook range to be launched in Australia, is notching up another achievement: the first Ultrabook in Australia to be available for less than $1,000. The entry-level model, the Aspire S3-951-2364G34iss, has received a $200 price drop and
will now sell for $999 (savvy shoppers may have noticed the discount already in effect at some retailers across the weekend). The $999 model runs on a Core i3 CPU and semi-skirts one of the Ultrabook's defining characteristics: storage via SSD. While the model does include a 20GB SSD to boost performance for caching, startup and running apps, a 320GB mechanical drive plays saddle horse for general storage. Still, it's a beautiful-looking thing, easy to transport and will ably satisfy for most general computing tasks. Here's hoping Acer's lead pushes prices down across the Ultrabook board -- otherwise why wouldn't you just opt for an Air?
