It’s not quite the $600USD price Qualcomm notes in the US, but Australians should see less expensive laptops with better battery life this year, too.
If the idea of a “less expensive laptop” is hopefully on the cards for this year, we bet the hope for “not awful battery life” is one of the things set to accompany it.
Very much like a Venn diagram where you can only actually pick two things, “value”, “portable”, and “great battery” often don’t mix together.
You can get a value-based laptop with a great battery, but it probably won’t be super portable. You can get a properly portable notebook with a great battery, but it won’t be cheap. And you can get a value-driven sub-notebook, but the battery life, that probably won’t be amazing.
That could change this year, though.
We saw a preview of that with the first breed of new Snapdragon PCs in 2024, Windows laptops that ran a variant of the mobile processors commonly found in phones, and they managed to bring performance and solid battery life to the price range wedged between $1200 and $2000 in Australia. Dell’s offering was so good, we even awarded it a Best Pick last year.
In 2025, Qualcomm’s tech could help manufacturers land that price even lower.
Announced at CES 2025 like so many things, Qualcomm has announced the “Snapdragon X”, a computer chip built for systems made for the $600 USD price range, which roughly translates to the $1000 price range in Australia.
The hardware aims to be relatively fast while still offering Neural Processing Unit hardware for AI PCs, essentially delivering a budget system for students and value-driven customers looking for a laptop that will do the job and won’t cost an arm or a leg.
Windows 11 will be used on these systems, and Qualcomm has said major PC makers are already set to release computers using this hardware, from the likes of Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo this year.
In terms of exactly when, our expectation is between February and April, possibly just before. With Mobile World Congress on in March, it’s entirely possible laptop makers will wait until that event to show off how “mobile” their new gear is, and release it shortly. Either way, you probably don’t have too long to wait.
