For the first time in too many years, laptop makers are trying to sell you on affordable devices that don’t look or perform like cheap plastic Fisher-Price PCs. But if you’re considering sticking with a Windows machine over the petite and colorful MacBook Neo, you should know that Apple’s $700 device (after recent price hikes) with an iPhone-first chip has an edge that other laptops can’t quite match.
Lenovo granted me access to its IdeaPad Slim 3i, one of the first laptops to arrive in the U.S. with Intel’s new Wildcat Lake series of mobile PC chips. The PC industry is depending on Intel’s entry-level chips for its own answers to the MacBook Neo, so the chip’s performance is all the more important, even if this laptop isn’t exactly what you want, unless you can’t spend too much money on a touchscreen device.
The IdeaPad Slim 3i runs on the new Intel Core 7 350 chip with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. On its face, that’s better than the MacBook Neo’s base 8GB of unified memory and 256GB of storage. Lenovo originally billed this as a budget laptop, though it currently costs $1,100 exclusively through Best Buy. The company told Gizmodo that it should eventually give the IdeaPad Slim 3i a discount to hit a price point around $800 to $900, but it couldn’t tell me a timeline of when prospective PC buyers could expect that.
