I was reading an article on Macworld UK this morning about the flood of Ultrabooks being released at CES this year and how Apple would respond. The answer is very simple — they won’t.

According to the article, Ultrabooks are “lightweight notebooks that rely on solid-state storage (SSD) in lieu of a traditional platter-based hard disk drive and forgo an optical drive.”

In other words, it’s a MacBook Air.

Why would Apple need to respond to its competitors releasing a lightweight notebook to compete with one of its existing computers? Apple is the company that started the category, much the same as it started the modern version of MP3 players with the iPod, the modern smartphone with the iPhone, and the modern tablet with the iPad.

Would anyone expect Apple to respond to a new tablet copying the iPad? No.

The difference between Apple and its competition is simple. Apple takes a concept, improves it and releases a product that consumers understand and want to purchase.

Apple’s competition sees its success with said product and copies it.

There will be more than 75 Ultrabook models released at CES this year and they are all in response to the MacBook Air. Yet another product category that Apple is leading.