Vizio vs. Apple: The Battle of the 'Ultrabooks'

Vizio's jumping from the living room to the home office, expanding from its established base in flat-panel televisions into the world of desktop and portable computing. According to Vizio CTO Matt McRae, speaking to Bloomberg, the company plans to unleash two brand-new desktop PCs and three notebooks at next week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The Financial Times reports that the two desktops are going to be a 24-inch and 27-inch all-in-one PCs, while the three notebooks are split into two "ultrabooks" ? thin and light portable PCs at screen sizes of 14 inches and 15.6 inches ? as well as a second 15.6-inch laptop that's alleged to deliver, "extreme portable performance."

Vizio prefers to not call its laptops "ultrabooks," the moniker given to systems resembling Apple's MacBook Air that come with more jacked-up specs than a traditional (and chubbier) netbook. But the comparisons to Apple don't stop there for Vizio. The company's allegedly working to build an Apple-like look and feel into the systems it plans to unveil, but Vizio hopes to beat out Apple on price -- the second punch the one-two combination Vizio will use to appeal to consumers. Or, as McRae calls it, "a price that just doesn't seem possible."

"People ask why we're taking on an industry that has tough margins, a lot of long-established competitors, and is relatively stagnant, but we say that's exactly what the TV business was when we entered that market," said McRae, in an interview with the Financial Times.

"We've built a business model and strategy to identify markets that have matured and have slowed and then turn them upside down. We are uniquely advantaged in attacking stale markets that have sleepy giants that are not moving the ball forward much," he added.

Can Vizio's strategy work? Especially when a number of other computer manufacturers are also getting wise to the "ultrabook" concept ? targeting the MacBook Air on features, design, and price?

For those going all-Vizio with their choice of televisions and systems, the company is working on software that would tie its products together. This could allow Vizio HDTV watchers to quickly pull up supplementary information about a show or a movie on their Vizio tablet or notebook, for example. It remains to be seen if consumers would be given the ability to quickly switch their media between devices, a la Apple's AirPlay feature.

But perhaps a bit of Vizio's future in a crowded PC market can be revealed from its past: Vizio's eight-inch, $329 Android tablet that was designed to compete against Apple's $500 iPad allegedly sold out of its initial inventory in only four months, reaching total unit sales "way over six figures," said McRae, speaking to the Wall Street Journal. And it's not as if Vizio's been the only tablet manufacturer on the block.

Vizio's desktops and notebooks are expected to ship in May.

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