Arm PCs vs. Arm MacBooks: Let’s compare
I love Windows and I love PCs. But when it comes to Arm laptops, you lose a lot of the PC’s advantages—like upgradeable hardware, near-perfect backwards compatibility, a huge library of PC games, etc. Arm laptops fail to deliver on those fronts, and if those are your highest priorities, then you’re better off with an Intel or AMD laptop.
Moreover, Arm-based Windows laptops with Qualcomm Snapdragon chips are failing to deliver the price points I’d hoped for at launch. (More on that in a moment.) Meanwhile, Arm-based MacBooks are becoming shockingly more affordable.
IDG
Right now, in mid-August 2025 as we head into back-to-school season, you can get an M1 MacBook Air for $599 from Walmart, down from $650 retail. Sure, it only has 8GB of RAM, and sure, it was originally released in 2020. But it’s still a high-quality machine—not cheap, not plasticky, and not a lower-end screen just to reach that price point. It was top-of-the-line when it released in 2020. Similarly, you can grab a current-gen M4 MacBook Air for $799 from Best Buy, down from $999 retail.
IDG / Matthew Smith
For comparison, how much is a high-end Snapdragon X Elite laptop? The Asus Vivobook S 15 retails for $1,299 and still costs about a grand on sale. The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x retails for $1,199 and sometimes discounts down to $900. The base model of Microsoft’s 13-inch Surface Laptop 7 retailed for $999 and went as low as $750 on sale.
Personally, I would rather have a Windows laptop on the go. But I’d also have a hard time convincing anyone who’s neutral into buying a Qualcomm Snapdragon X-powered laptop over a MacBook, especially once we started comparing prices.
