One of our recent ET deals was a premium ultrabook laptop. While our deal today is an ultra-thin laptop with an Intel processor, it technically isn’t an “ultrabook”.
When Intel created the ultrabook category of Windows laptops, and place a huge amount of marketing dollars behind the product name, they set certain requirements for the laptops themselves. These are based around the processor (of course), thickness, minimum battery life, resume from hibernation time, storage transfer rate, and the presences of I/O ports.
Second or third generation Intel processors and USB 3.0 ports are near ubiquitous on all 2012 laptops, as is a minimum of 5 hours of battery life. This leaves the real differentiator as the storage device and design thickness. With a minimum storage transfer rate of 80MBps and resume from hibernate time of 7 seconds, and an SSD (or mSATA smart-cache SSD) is required for all officially certified ultrabooks.
Given that the budget-priced 13 measures 20.7mm thick and does not come with an SSD, it cannot be officially called an ultrabook. But what you lose with a few mm of thickness and a handful of seconds in boot time you gain back in dollars.
While most ultrabooks are priced $600-700 or greater, the deal of the day costs $469.99 (shipping included). It comes equipped with a “Sandy Bridge” Core i3 processor, 6GB of DDR3 RAM, and a 500GB hard drive. Three USB 3.0 ports, Ethernet, Bluetooth 4.0, and HDMI output are standard, along with a media card reader and 802.11n WiFi. Dell even tosses in 90 days of premium phone support and 1 year of in-home warranty service at no extra cost.
Since this is one of the lowest prices we have ever see on the 13 , it also means that this coupon may end at any time.
ET deals: Dell Inspiron 13 ultra-thin laptop for $469
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