Ultrabooks are fine, but we have to remember who they're aimed at. They're aimed at office users, casual home users, students, and a large subset of programmers who don't need to run 50 VMs. They're not aimed at gamers, engineers, (some subset of) programmers, and technicians.

For those 4 groups, most ultrabooks suffer from:

1. Being underpowered (for gamers and some engineers this means graphically, for programmers memory/cpu count/cpu speed)

2. Insufficient ports (particularly for engineers, technicians, and some programmers and gamers)

3. Insufficiently sturdy (technicians, some engineers and programmers)

But often they do have good battery life, but by virtue of being underpowered that doesn't really help in the balance.

Companies that do make laptops (IME) aimed at gamers, tend to not make laptops that have decent battery life (that is, most desktop replacement laptops get good performance, but terrible battery life). And laptops aimed at engineers and technicians tend to be 3" thick, have terrible battery life, and have grossly underpowered processors and graphics, but they have every port you could ever want.

Horses for courses. If I had to lug it through airports everyday, I'd want the lightest laptop I could possibly live with.

Although I don't really care about how thin it is, per se. Weight is what matters.

I know this is HN, but I have to remind you most users don't fly airplanes every day. :)

Currently not. At one point in my brother's career, he came pretty close.

I don’t think the ultra book is a meme. I’d consider the MacBook Air to be the single most successful laptop of all time, and for good reason. For many people it’s basically the perfect compromise of size, weight, power and battery life. (Also, while the Air is thin, it is certainly not fragile). The current M1 Air is a really great machine. And while it’s not powerful enough for my work (data scientist - waiting for a 16 inch MBP, or perhaps I’ll get a larger thinkpad and put Linux on it), I am not going to delude myself into thinking that my needs are in any way representative of the average consumer. A good ultra book is perfect for people browsing the web and using office apps who want good portability.

> I really hope this ultrabook meme ends.

is that really necessary? my "work" is a complicated desktop c++ application. short of a 17" desktop replacement, there simply isn't enough thermal budget in any conceivable laptop design to compile this program in under an hour. thus, all I want out of a laptop is the thinnest lightest x86 machine that offers decent performance for web browsing, playing movies, and editing word documents.

I really hope for a future in which we can both get laptops that fit our needs.

My issue with ultrabooks proliferating is that they've made other, more capable machines more niche and more expensive. It's similar to the way that mobile phones standardized on featureless glass slabs after the entire industry decided to take after Apple, with shockingly little innovation happening outside of software.

It lowers the lowest common denominator, in other words. The gulf between "consumption machine" and "work machine" is now higher.

that's understandable, but it sounds like what you're really saying here is that you want to take advantage of economies of scale for products that don't make the trade-offs that most consumers actually want.

I don't really know if all of that is necessarily true. I've had a ThinkPad X in daily use for 6-7 years now, and I've even fallen flat on top of it after slipping on ice going home one winter. It's still chugging along. It's not the thinnest device there is, but there's definitely some kind of an attempt in that direction compared to bulkier devices. (The associated compromises in general are also there.)

I have no experience with Apple hardware, but I don't think Airs have a reputation of being super fragile either.

The thinner and lighter form factor also does have its advantages; it's a bit more comfortable to handle when using it to watch video on the couch, for example.

Compromised performance is definitely true, though. (Or compromised thermals, or some kind of a compromise on that axis in any case.) Ditto for more or less compromised upgradability and replaceability, which is unfortunate.

I wouldn't necessarily want the thinness to end, although striving towards it at all costs is something I would also disagree with, and probably wouldn't go for the absolute thinnest stuff there is.