Credit: Intel

It seems fair to say that Apple’s MacBook Neo took the rest of the PC industry by surprise. Companies are used to competing on price and features with $1,000-and-up Apple laptops like the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, but their $600 and $700 models usually come with cut corners and compromises that are more noticeable than the Neo’s. The CEO of Asus admitted to being surprised by the laptop’s price (while simultaneously trying to downplay the Neo’s value); a Microsoft-backed study comparing PCs to the MacBook Neo included several laptops that can’t compete with the Neo’s price unless they’re deeply discounted.

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve started to see a more intentional and targeted response to the MacBook Neo from PC makers. These mostly seem to revolve around Intel’s low-end Core Series 3 processors, codenamed Wildcat Lake; while Intel’s last few generations of low-end chips have mostly been rebrands of older and less power-efficient parts, Wildcat Lake is a new purpose-built budget chip that benefits from Intel’s latest CPU and GPU architectures and its 18A manufacturing process. This should help these chips compete better with the Apple A18 Pro in the MacBook Neo.

Many early Wildcat Lake systems have already been announced, though not all have included a price tag, and several have only been announced for the Chinese market as of this writing. Lenovo is planning to launch some IdeaPad Slim models with the new processors, with some optional spec upgrades including 16GB of RAM and a 120 Hz high-refresh-rate display. Asus and HP have also announced some early products.

Most manufacturers that have announced Wildcat Lake laptops are playing coy about pricing and availability—this is somewhat understandable, given ongoing pricing volatility and component supply shortages. On paper, these systems have advantages over the MacBook Neo, but plenty of laptops have spec-sheet advantages as well. Whether they’re attractive will depend entirely on their cost; we may hear more about these systems (and other PCs from other manufacturers) during Computex in early June.

Chuwi’s $449 “Unibook,” a blessedly nondescript laptop that looks good on paper but may or may not work out in real life.
Credit: Chuwi

Chinese electronics manufacturer Chuwi contacted Ars about one aggressively priced Wildcat Lake laptop, a device called the “UniBook” with a Core 3 304 processor, a 14-inch 1200p IPS display, a backlit keyboard, 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and more ports than the MacBook Neo, for an advertised price of $449. The spec sheet tells us nothing about how this laptop will feel to use, how it will hold up over time, or its US availability (a handful of Chuwi devices are available through Amazon, and the company sells some through its online store). But something with roughly these specs at around this price is what we’d like to see in true purpose-built MacBook Neo competitors from the PC companies.

A little help from Intel?

Along with several of these Wildcat Lake systems, Intel’s Chinese arm recently announced something called “Project Firefly.” Firefly appears to be an Intel initiative to reduce costs and manufacturing complexity by providing PC makers with more reference designs. These wouldn’t take all the design decisions out of the manufacturers’ hands, but by standardizing on things like motherboard layout and thermal specifications they could potentially save companies money on development that could then be passed down to customers; the first laptop to take advantage of Project Firefly will be Lenovo’s Lecoo Air 14, but it’s unclear whether or when we’ll see these laptops in the US.

Intel has put its thumb on the scale of the PC industry before, occasionally offering savings or subsidies to companies that use its specs. Intel incentivized the development of MacBook Air-style thin-and-lights in the early 2010s with its Ultrabook program, and before that, it incentivized the adoption of Wi-Fi in consumer laptops with its Centrino branding.

One key difference here is that $500-and-below PC laptops have existed for decades; the issue is that these systems are usually saddled with undesirable compromises, or only dip into that price range when they’re on sale, or are just generally low-quality and unpleasant to use. And when these companies do make a good low-end or midrange laptop, it’s not a guarantee that that laptop’s successor will also be good in the same ways. Intel might be able to help with the pricing, but it remains to be seen if they can help with availability or consistency.