Acer developing true MacBook Air rival?
updated 11:20 am EST, Thu February 11, 2010
Acer would use ULV Core iX to get ultrathin
Acer is readying an ultraportable that it hopes could take on Apple and HP in one fell swoop, the company reportedly said today. While it has had a relative amount of success with its Timeline lightweight notebooks, the Taiwan firm is believed to be developing an "ace in the hole" system that would use ULV Core i5 or i7 processors and measure just 0.75 inches thick, slightly thinner than the MacBook Air and much thinner than HP's current lineup.
The system would consequently be sleeker than the existing Timeline series but offer speed closer to a full-size notebook. Although the low-energy Core i5 and i7 have at most a 1.2GHz regular clock speed, they can ramp up to 1.86GHz and 2.26GHz in Turbo Boost mode and support Hyperthreading to occasionally perform more like quad-core processors.
Acer recently overtook Dell for the second place spot in world PC shipments but has set the ambitious goal of unseating HP for the top spot as soon as this year. Much of this has been accomplished simply by shipping inexpensive PCs but also by dominance of the netbook space, where the Aspire One actually has more traction than netbook pioneer ASUS' Eee PCs. HP has a large presence in netbooks but hasn't caught on in popularity; most of its sales are of low end, full size notebooks.
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I don't' understand how Acer's computer can be called a macbook air rival when it runs Windows. I'm not a windows hater, but clearly the operating systems are different and I can't imagine a Mac user switching to a windows machine just because its size is similar to the macbook air. This machine is more likely a rival to other windows machines of similar size and shape like the Dell Adamo.