They started at $1,000. Then $700. Then $600 budget machines. Now, Qualcomm says the price of its Arm-based Windows laptops will hit $300 this year.
Even though RAMageddon has yet to subside and PC prices keep climbing, the company says it’s built a new budget laptop platform called Snapdragon C — “C” as in “Compute” — to keep entry-level laptops affordable.
“With Snapdragon C, we are raising the bar for what budget-conscious laptop buyers should expect,” Qualcomm senior director of product management Mandar Deshpande told journalists on a conference call. “You get the benefits of a responsive system, lag-free performance, browsing, video calls, streaming, multitasking, everything.” Up until now, getting everything has been a tall order even at $600. Would these laptops really undercut the MacBook Neo by up to half?
The new laptops should also have “all-day battery life,” “not a lot of fan noise,” and be “a laptop that just works,” added Deshpande.
Qualcomm and partners are assuredly cutting some corners to get to $300. The new platform doesn’t use Qualcomm’s Oryon CPU cores that underpin all its latest Windows laptop and smartphone chips, for instance, but are instead based on the older Kryo cores found in older phones and Chromebooks.
And while “even the slowest tier” will now have an NPU for local AI compute, they won’t meet Microsoft’s Copilot Plus PC requirements for its full suite of AI tools, the company admits.
Acer, HP, and Lenovo are the first partners. Acer is lightly announcing its system today: the Acer Aspire Go 15 AG15-Q31P. It’s a 15.6-inch 1080p laptop with “up to” 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, with two “full-function” USB-C ports, a USB-A port, an HDMI 1.4 port, Wi-Fi 6E, a 1080p webcam, and a 53Wh battery.
Acer isn’t sharing more detailed specs, a release date, or price yet, and neither HP nor Lenovo had models to share today. But they should ship this year.
Qualcomm isn’t sharing more about the Snapdragon C platform itself yet either, though Deshpande says the company will be ready to do so in a couple months. He says multiple laptops are in development. Currently, the company is only announcing Snapdragon C for Windows laptops, saying it’s not ready to talk about Googlebooks today.
