Shopping for PCs is a wretched, broken experience – and budget ultrabooks haven’t helped

By Poonam DAS

When Intel unveiled its ultrabook concept two years ago, the company positioned the new systems as best-in-class platforms that would give manufacturers the tools they needed to compete against the MacBook Air. The idea was to provide customers with a product category they could think of as synonymous with “great computing.” In some ways, that strategy has worked — laptops have gotten markedly thinner and a higher percentage of total systems are using low-voltage, battery boosting processors.

But the hoped-for simplification of the PC buying experience? It’s only gotten worse. In this the ultrabook program has been a failure and the process of buying a PC has not been improved or remotely simplified.

Right now, there are two different ultrabook markets in the US. At the high-end, there are systems like the Dell XPS 12 and Lenovo Yoga — signature, distinctive systems that typically start at $900-1200 and offer high-resolution displays, Haswell processors, and SSD cache drives (or full SSDs). But below these high-end signature systems there’s a second class of ultrabook that’s been flung into the mix of mainstream models with virtually no effort to explain why ultrabooks are better than their non-ultrabook counterparts.

Let’s take a look at Dell and Lenovo for an example of how terrible things have gotten. (This should not be read as implying that HP, Asus, or Toshiba are actually doing any better.)

First, there’s the troubling fact that low-power mobile Haswell is hard to find. Dell’s mainstream Inspiron 15R does have a Haswell option, but only if paired with a 5400RPM HDD (no SSD or SSD caching), a thicker chassis, and a low-resolution 1366×768 monitor.  So you can buy the Inspiron 15z ultrabook for $599 with an Ivy Bridge Core i3-3227U (1.9GHz), 6GB of standard DDR3-1600, HD 4000 graphics, and a 500GB HDD with 32GB SSD cache, a 4-cell battery, and a Centrino Wireless 2230 adapter, or an Inspiron 15R with a Core i5-4200U (1.6GHz base, 2.6GHz Turbo), 6GB of low-voltage DDR3L-1600, Intel HD 4400 graphics, a 500GB HDD without the SSD cache, a six-cell battery, and a Dell wireless adapter. But which is better?

The Inspiron 15R is going to offer better battery life, but the SSD cache on the 15z is going to result in snappier performance. This fact, however, is scarcely drawn out. You have to click on a “Tell Me More” option to see anything about the benefits of the SSD cache drive on the the ultrabook system. What you get is shown above, highlighted in red.

If you want Haswell and solid state storage, then you need an XPS 12 — which means you’d better also want a high-resolution 12.5-inch display and have $1200 to drop.