I walked into COMPUTEX season this year expecting to be bored. Another spin around the AI carousel, another wall of slides with the word agentic on them, another keynote where someone holds up a chip and tells me it’s the most important thing to happen since fire. And sure, some of that is coming. But the more I dig into what’s lined up for Taipei from June 2nd to 5th, the more I think this might be the most consequential Computex in years—and not for the reasons the datacenter crowd wants me to care about. Let me walk you through what I’m excited about.
The worst-kept secret in tech right now is that NVIDIA is about to jump into laptop processors. NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Arm have all been posting the same cryptic “A new era of PC” tease, complete with map coordinates that drop you right onto the venue where Jensen Huang gives his keynote Sunday night (or Monday late morning if you’re in Taipei). When three companies that size coordinate a tease like that, they’re not warming up for a minor announcement.
The chip everyone expects is called the N1X, an Arm-based part built with MediaTek. What makes me lean forward is the GPU side of it. This isn’t NVIDIA bolting a weak integrated graphics chip onto a CPU and calling it a day—the rumored design pairs a serious processor with a Blackwell-class GPU. If that pans out, it would be the first time a Windows-on-Arm laptop could realistically handle gaming, video editing, and heavy AI work without a separate discrete graphics card. That’s the holy grail laptop makers have been chasing for years, and frankly the thing Qualcomm never quite delivered on.
There’s a knock-on effect I love here too. NVIDIA’s move into Windows-on-Arm breaks Qualcomm’s exclusive hold on the market. More players, more pressure, better laptops for us. Competition is the best thing that can happen to a stagnant category.
Just keep your expectations honest: this is still pre-launch. Specs leak, products slip, and “it runs everything perfectly” is a promise no Arm laptop has fully kept yet. I’ll believe the gaming-without-a-dGPU dream when I see real games running on real hardware. But the direction is thrilling.
The other story I can’t stop thinking about is what’s happening at the cheap end. Apple’s $599 MacBook Neo has rattled the entire PC industry, and the response is going to be all over the COMPUTEX show floor.
Acer’s already shown an answer in the form of a $699 laptop running Intel silicon, and Qualcomm has a new chip line literally called Snapdragon C—the “C” stands for “compute,” which is about as charmingly blunt as branding gets—aimed squarely at affordable laptops. I find this whole fight far more interesting than another $3,000 halo machine, because it’s the segment that decides what most people end up buying. When a single $599 laptop forces this many giants to scramble, you know the floor of good enough just got raised for everybody.
Related: MacBook Neo vs. M5 MacBook Air: Here’s what changes when Apple uses a phone chip
A small caveat I’d offer if you’re shopping the budget tier: watch the RAM. Some of these aggressive price points come with 8 GB of memory, and in 2026 that’s the spec I’d scrutinize hardest before buying new.
Intel is making a real play for gaming handhelds this year with its Arc G3 and G3 Extreme chips, built off the same Panther Lake architecture as its newest laptop processors. We’ve already seen the lineup forming up MSI’s new Claw, Acer’s Predator Atlas, and the OneXPlayer 3 are all expected to use these parts.
AMD has owned this space almost by default, so I’m rooting for Intel to make it a real fight. My honest hope here isn’t raw horsepower—it’s battery life. The eternal curse of these little machines is firing up a game only to watch it die in 90 minutes, and a more efficient architecture is exactly what could fix that.
The thing I keep bracing myself for, though, is price. Between the broader memory situation and recent Steam Deck price increases, I don’t expect any of these to be cheap. None of the makers have even committed to numbers yet, which tells you something about how nervous everyone is.
Here’s the storm cloud over the whole show. The cost of memory and storage has gone vertical. The spot price of certain memory products is up more than 600% over the past year, according to data from inSpectrum, and IDC projects total memory revenue climbing toward roughly $800 billion next year as AI datacenters hoover up supply and pay whatever it takes to get it. Industry voices are warning these crunches may not ease until late 2027.
What does that mean for you and me? Higher prices on basically everything with a chip in it, and a real squeeze on the affordable end where margins were already razor-thin. It’s the unglamorous backdrop to every shiny launch in Taipei, and it’s the reason so many companies are dodging questions about pricing. When I’m evaluating anything announced this week, the memory configuration and the eventual cost are the first things I’m going to want pinned down—because a gorgeous spec sheet means nothing if the thing lands at a price nobody can stomach.
So here’s where I’ve landed. The headline will be NVIDIA’s keynote, and rightly s —a credible third option in Windows laptops is the kind of shift that reshapes the next several years of computing. But the quieter story, the budget-laptop brawl kicked off by the MacBook Neo, might matter more to most people’s wallets.
What I love about COMPUTEX is that it’s still the show where hardware makers get weird and ambitious, and in 2026, the personal computer—the thing on your desk or in your bag, not in some hyperscaler’s warehouse—commands attention again. After a few years in the shadow of the AI gold rush, the PC is the main character again.
My advice is simple. Don’t buy anything in a panic, watch how pricing shakes out once the dust settles, and pay less attention to the spec-sheet superlatives and more to which of these promises actually ships. The hype is loud. The good news is that, for once, the hardware might live up to it.