Dell Inc plans to ship an ultra- thin notebook computer called Adamo this month, in a bid to lure away upscale customers from Apple Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co.
Adamo is 1.7cm thick, making it one of the thinnest notebooks on the market, Dell said in a statement on Tuesday. The device has a 13.4-inch screen and weighs 1.8kg. It costs either US$1,999 or US$2,699, depending on the features.
Chief executive officer Michael Dell has stepped up the company’s focus on product design, an attempt to reach more style-conscious consumers.
Adamo will compete with Apple’s US$1,800 MacBook Air and Hewlett-Packard’s US$1,900 Voodoo Envy — both of which are also less than an inch thick.
Still, Adamo may be a tough sell in a recession, UBS AG analyst Maynard Um said.
“Although we believe Adamo is the right design, broader consumer spending weakness may limit demand, given its high US$1,999 starting price,” the New York-based analyst told investors in a report on Tuesday.
He has a neutral rating on the shares.
Adamo, which is Latin for “to fall in love with,” took a year to create and was developed under heavy secrecy, said John New, a Dell senior product manager.
The notebook has a glass-and-aluminum chassis, a battery life of four to five hours, a backlit display and keyboard, and uses a solid-state drive instead of a hard-disk drive.
That means information is stored on silicon chips, rather than spinning magnetic disks.
“It’s designed for a fashion-forward user” who doesn’t want a notebook that everyone else has, New said.
Notebook sales are outpacing desktops machines, spurring computer makers to expand the number of portable models they offer.
Total PC shipments will decline 4.5 percent worldwide this year to 282 million machines, as unemployment rises and companies curb spending, research firm IDC said.
Dell generates almost 60 percent of its revenue from PCs, with more than half of that from portables.
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