| I don't think you could find a windows laptop with comparable build quality (or display quality, which I consider important if you intend to use a laptop for its intended purpose) for 1/2 the price of the air. I do think you could find a laptop in the same performance ballpark (ie. 75%+ of the single core speed, which seems to be where the newest gen Intel mobile chips sit in comparison). This is a bigger difference than I expected, admittedly, though the gap closes if you care about multicore performance numbers. Here in AU, a 16GB air with 512GB SSD = 2400AUD. The base model (8/256)) = 1800 AUD. I would consider an appropriate comparison model to the air to be something like this:
https://www.harveynorman.com.au/acer-swift-go-evo-14-inch-co... For 1/2 the price, you get a laptop with an OLED screen and one of the newest/fastest non-M3 processors you can buy. It also happened to be the cheapest laptop with a new Meteor lake processor I could find, though I'd have to imagine there are laptops with worse specifications in other areas for the cheaper. You can obviously spend up from there to improve build quality, get more SSD space (probably by swapping out the stock NVMe drive), more RAM (if you're lucky maybe they have SODIMMs, though I'd guess most laptops, especially non-16", might have soldered memory). In terms of non-savvy vs savvy, mostly it's that a non-savvy laptop buyer, generally speaking, doesn't understand: - Screen quality/tech. Resolution, TN vs IPS vs OLED, matte vs gloss, maximum brightness - How different processor generations compare. Especially walking into a store, it's common in my experience for laptops with 5500u (Zen 2 6 core) to be sitting next to a laptop with a new eg. 125H, both at similar prices. The newer processor is the pick (performance wise), but this is completely nonobvious. It's particularly bad at lower specs, where you can have an i3 N300 (8 e cores) next to perhaps a Ryzen 5700u or Intel 13600h... In theory salespeople should lead them in the right direction, but likely as not they can spend twice as much on a fancy laptop that looks schmick (and probably is) when they could get 90% of the same experience with something like the Acer above. eg:
https://www.harveynorman.com.au/hp-envy-x360-14-inch-ultra-7... This is admittedly a 2in1, and it has a better processor, but it could well be worse in every other way. |