Here’s what hardware companies are doing now: slicing and dicing the price points for ultra-thin computers. Case in point, the latest arrival from Acer. The new Acer Aspire Timeline Ultra M5 Series is .81 inches thin and weighs 4.3 pounds.
The specs, as listed here by Mashable:
The M5 Ultrabook comes in 14- and 15.6-inch HD displays, each packing third-generation Intel Core processors (Core i3 and i5 only), a 500GB hard disk drive and the latest in Nvidia discrete graphics. Unusual in an ultra-thin design, the M5 models also have optical drives. The notebooks, which also feature two USB 3.0 ports, tout a full-size chiclet-style keyboard.
You don’t have to follow all that but it’s basically not as fancy or as powerful as what the MacBook Air offers and that’s the kind of rock star ultrabook computer on the market right now. The Acer computer runs Windows and comes in cheaper than Apple’s offering, starting at $679.
As more and more computing moves to the cloud for storage and things like video streaming, the personal computer is becoming more of a terminal than a powerful machine on its own. Whereas we used to run MS Word on a big desktop PC, we might use Google Docs on an ultrabook today.
Stories You Might Like
There’s a lot happening in the world. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you.
You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible.
Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.
