Forget Intel’s prediction of $699 Ultrabooks. Forget our own prediction of $599 by the end of the year! The $599 Ivy Bridge Ultrabook is here already with the a great offer on the Vizio CT14. In Europe, prices have dipped to below €599.
It’s Vizio that have come through with the most impressive offer. The Vizio CT14-A0 1.8Ghz Ivy Bridge (Core i3) with a 128GB SSD and 1600×900 IPS screen. We can hardly believe that! It even comes with a Windows Signature (no bloatware) build of Windows 7 Home Premium. It’s at $599 at Amazon today.
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So where’s the catch? OK, reviewers aren’t too happy about the trackpad and say that the SSD drive could be faster but we’re not seeing any major issues. Unfortunately we haven’t had the chance to review this one. We say, take a look at the reviews and if you’re happy with the issues (note no SD card slot, no keyboard backlight) go get it!
For a few dollars more you can pick up another American Ultrabook. The Dell Inspiron i14Z is down from $699 to $609.99 at Amazon. This student-focused Ultrabook comes with a DVD writer, 6GB of RAM and a 500GB hybrid hard drive but only the Sandy Bridge Core i5 at 1.4Ghz.
If you insist on a Core i5 Ivy Bridge Ultrabook, look no further than the Samsung Series 5 with 500GB hard drive. We’ve still got on in use here (Sandy Bridge version) and it’s well built. $649.91 at Amazon.com today.
Moving over to Europe we see the Sandy Bridge-based Acer TimelineU-M3 at €587.90 in Germany and the equivalent of 538.73 at Sainsburys in the UK (£429.99) and the Lenovo U310 at €599.99 (also the Sandy Bridge version.) The Dell Inspiron 14z, Sony Vaio SVT11, Samsung Series5, Acer UX21, HP Envy 4 and Lenovo U310 are also approaching the 600 Euros mark.
It’s the end of Sept 2012 and there’s three months of competitive selling ahead. Windows 8 launches in about a month and Black Friday/Cyber Monday in two months. There’s scope for a $550 Ultrabook in that time so let’s all keep an eye out for it. If you spot it first, let us know via the contact page.
What a difference $42 makes. I picked up my vizio for $641 about a month ago from walmart but that price didn’t rate any headlines. After all the problems I had with the asus zenbook and samsung s9 before returning them its been a joy using the vizio… great to work with.
Truly impressive for an ultrabook with an above average display resolution and SSD to be the cheapest. Makes me wonder why so many other ultrabooks cost so much more.
This is a temporary offer though. The cheapest with Ivy Bridge and SSD without discounts should be reached by Cyberpower when they release their Ultrabook soon.
Vizio excels at minimizing supply chain and manufacturing costs to deliver low cost TV hardware. This is their first foray into computers… they have been playing with prices since launch seeing how sensitive price is on their sales. They have been using their low end 14 (currently $599) and 15 (currently 799) to test the waters so to speak.
Whatever revised notebooks they come out with after Win8 launches will properly reflect what they have learned. Id expect pricing to be aggressive though based on what we are seeing with their first stab at it.
Its so cheap, because Vizio can’t move their Inventory any other way. They don’t have a name for laptops, and at the original price, they were lacking some stuff and had poor reviews of the keyboard Vizio said they spent a year developing from scratch…
How you can spend one Year between 2011 and 2012, developing a keyboard from scratch without backlight is beyond me, but apparently, the typing action didn’t impress people either… maybe Vizio will just copy from Lenovo next time :P
Alchemist:
I don’t disagree with this. I want to see how they progress in this space.
As do i David. If anyone told me when i started looking at ultrabooks that I would prefer the vizio 14 to the zenbook and series 9 I would have thought they were crazy, but there is a lot to be said for something just working the way its supposed to. I hope vizio has touch models coming, if they do I’ll be looking at them first.
The screen resolution and overall design is pretty nice.
I haven’t seen any reviews on whether the screen also has enough brightness and contrast to use outdoors…
300 CD/m² and a contrast of at least 500:1 would definitely make it good enough. Samsung would still be better, but double the price at this point…
Now, if the screen were as dark as most of Acer’s stuff, I’d prefer to spend twice that and have a screen that doesn’t sabotage my work efforts.