Immediately’s Arm PCs cannot compete with $599 MacBooks. We deserve higher

Arm PCs vs. Arm MacBooks: Let’s evaluate

I really like Home windows and I really like PCs. However in terms of Arm laptops, you lose quite a lot of the PC’s benefits—like upgradeable {hardware}, near-perfect backwards compatibility, an enormous library of PC video games, and many others. Arm laptops fail to ship on these fronts, and if these are your highest priorities, then you definately’re higher off with an Intel or AMD laptop computer.

Furthermore, Arm-based Home windows laptops with Qualcomm Snapdragon chips are failing to ship the worth factors I’d hoped for at launch. (Extra on that in a second.) In the meantime, Arm-based MacBooks have gotten shockingly extra inexpensive.

Proper now, in mid-August 2025 as we head into back-to-school season, you may get an M1 MacBook Air for $599 from Walmart, down from $650 retail. Certain, it solely has 8GB of RAM, and positive, it was initially launched in 2020. Nevertheless it’s nonetheless a high-quality machine—not low-cost, not plasticky, and never a lower-end display screen simply to achieve that worth level. It was top-of-the-line when it launched in 2020. Equally, you possibly can seize a current-gen M4 MacBook Air for $799 from Finest Purchase, down from $999 retail.

IDG / Matthew Smith

For comparability, how a lot is a high-end Snapdragon X Elite laptop computer? The Asus Vivobook S 15 retails for $1,299 and nonetheless prices a couple of grand on sale. The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x retails for $1,199 and typically reductions all the way down to $900. The bottom mannequin of Microsoft’s 13-inch Floor Laptop computer 7 retailed for $999 and went as little as $750 on sale.

Personally, I’d reasonably have a Home windows laptop computer on the go. However I’d even have a tough time convincing anybody who’s impartial into shopping for a Qualcomm Snapdragon X-powered laptop computer over a MacBook, particularly as soon as we began evaluating costs.