The chipmaker, of course, doesn’t have any of its own gadgets to peddle this holiday season. It shelved plans to launch a video set-top-box, OnCue and is apparently trying to unload the technology.
Instead, Intel hopes to seed the tech ecosystem with a new class of laptop – the 2-in-1, a hybrid that can convert into a tablet either by reversing the screen or by detaching the keyboard.
It’s a nifty bit of technology, though it’s not clear many people want it. Variations of the technology go back at least a decade but they’ve never caught on.
And while keyboards have been available for tablets since the first iPad arrived, the vast majority of us simply don’t use our tablets to enter information. We consume it.
The businessmen and women in Intel’s ad campaign, perhaps, might like to have a convertible – something they can carry around the office or pull out on the airplane for casual reading.
And if they catch on, the 2-in-1s would give Intel a big opportunity to capture a share of the mobile device market.
The Intel-based 2-in-1s run on either Windows and Android (and, in at least one case, both), meaning that users can load them with software designed for regular PCs and laptops.
That’s something the iPad will never do, because the iPad runs on ARM-based microprocessors while Apple’s Macs all run on Intel chips.
It’s not that the 2-in-1s would displace tablets, but they might capture a share of the mobile market and give Intel-based devices a defendable advantage in at least a segment of the industry.
Intel has done a terrible job guessing what consumers want, as the company ruefully acknowledged at its investor day last month.
It missed the smartphone and tablet revolution altogether and was still touting the low-end netbook as the iPad revolutionized computing.
It took four years after Apple introduced the first MacBook Air for Intel to start pushing the Ultrabook, which appeared with nearly identical specifications to Apple’s device.
One key difference: The Ultrabook now emphasizes touchscreens, a feature the Air doesn’t have. That’s what makes the 2-in-1 possible.
So it may be that Intel is tilting at windmills with its holiday marketing campaign, but you can see why it might be worth Intel’s while to give it a run.