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.
See IdeaPad Slim 3i at Best Buy
With more RAM and more ports than many MacBook Neo competitors, like the new $700 Dell XPS 13, it feels extra curious that the 16-inch IdeaPad Slim 3i can’t perform on par with Apple’s low-end laptop.
When I ran the Intel Core 7 350 through our round of benchmarks, I wasn’t expecting some ultimate life form of PC performance. I was more curious how well it could do the menial, everyday tasks, like the MacBook Neo’s A18 Pro chip. Apple first built that chip for the iPhone 16 Pro, but it somehow outshines Intel’s chips in many of our tests.
In Geekbench 6, benchmarking software that gauges a CPU’s general capabilities, the A18 Pro outperformed the Intel Core 7 350 by just over 21% in single-core settings, meaning the MacBook Neo will be slightly faster for simple tasks like loading webpages. The two chips were nearly equivalent in multi-core settings, which implies both would perform about the same in apps that demand more CPU processing, like photo editing. At the same time, the IdeaPad Slim 3i with Intel’s Wildcat Lake chip outscored the Mac in CPU rendering tasks. The Intel CPU managed 25% better than the A18 Pro in Cinebench 2026 tests. It was also 1 minute and 48 seconds faster at rendering a scene of a BMW in Gizmodo’s Blender test.
The new affordable PCs for 2026 may be able to compete with the MacBook Neo in some apps, but not anywhere near the same in graphics-based tasks. Intel’s top-end Wildcat Lake chips are essentially cut-down versions of its excellent Panther Lake lineup that’s crowding the PC market. The problem is, Wildcat Lake chips make use of only two Xe3 GPU cores compared to four in the lowest-end Panther Lake, and that means graphics performance isn’t all that impressive. The 5-core GPU in the A18 Pro performed that same Blender test I ran before in 39 seconds. The Wildcat Lake’s integrated GPU took 2 minutes and 50 seconds. In real-time graphics tests, like 3DMark’s “Steel Nomad Lite,” the MacBook Air outshone the IdeaPad Slim 3i by close to 43%. In case you hoped to do any light gaming on the next Intel chip, just know you’ll struggle to run all but the most basic titles.
If Lenovo can lower the price, the IdeaPad Slim 3i may still seem like a good deal considering its bevy of ports. It packs in two USB-A, one USB-C, a headphone jack, and even an SD card reader and HDMI. A MacBook Neo and the Dell XPS 13 are both limited to only two USB-C ports. But consider the following: a Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5x with an ARM-based Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Plus chip costs $850, and it outperforms both Apple’s and Intel’s chips by leaps and bounds.
I can tell you straight up, you want a laptop that’s a competitor to MacBook Neo in more ways than just price or performance. The IdeaPad Slim 3i is a cheap laptop because it feels cheap. It starts with the lid, made of bouncy, smudge-prone plastic. Lift it and you’re greeted with a dull IPS display. The main reason you get this laptop is because of the ports, touchscreen, and clacky keyboard that includes a full numpad. You’ll also have to accept the fact it charges through a barrel port, though you could also juice it up via its USB-C ports.
We’ll see if Lenovo can create some future laptops that will not only compete with the MacBook Neo but also the Dell XPS 13 and other upcoming competitors like the Acer Swift Air 14. All those laptops promise solid aluminum bodies and additions to the screen and sound that make them feel more premium—just like the MacBook Neo. We’ll have to see for ourselves if these low-end PCs do any better if they only sport 8GB of RAM compared to the MacBook Neo’s 8GB of unified memory.
At a sub-$1,000 price point, there are still too few laptops that fulfill all your possible current or future needs. Hopefully, with this newfound budget competition, that may change. If not now, then soon.
