The first Intel Wildcat Lake "Core Series 3" laptops have entered the retail segment, tackling Apple's MacBook Neo with a strong value proposition.
Intel Has A Serious MacBook Neo Competitor In Its Hands With Wildcat Lake "Core Series 3" Laptops, Priced Around $600
Yesterday, we reported that Intel's partners were well on their way to launch Wildcat Lake "Core Series 3-powered laptops this week. And today, the first laptops have already hit retail shelves. One of the first to make way in the market segments is the Honor X14 which is a 14" design, featuring the Core 5 320, and based on its pricing, it looks great for mainstream audiences.
To recap, Apple's MacBook Neo did shake the PC segment, offering strong value and Apple's MacBook ecosystem in a premium aluminum chassis, starting at just $599. The laptop housed the A18 Pro chip, the same one that is used by Apple's iPhones, which is enough for mainstream usage. PC OEMs & x86 chip makers such as Intel saw this as a potential threat to their market share in the laptop segment & started to work on their own mainstream offering.
The thing is, Intel and PC vendors were offering mainstream solutions before the MacBook Neo, but they weren't usually that great, and any touch of premiumness resulted in costs way above the mainstream PC segment. Wildcat Lake CPUs change that, allowing OEMs to offer compact "thin & light" laptops, with a nice set of capabilities, in a premium finish.
As for the Honor X14, well, it has many things that are better than the entry-level MacBook Neo. The laptop boasts the Core 5 320, which is a 6-core chip that operates at up to 4.6 GHz, has 6 MB of cache, 35W TDP, and a 2 Xe3 core integrated GPU. It also comes with 16 GB of LPDDR5X-7467 MT/s memory, twice the amount of the Neo, and a 512 GB SSD for storage. The Neo starts at 256 GB and maxes out at 512 GB capacities.
The display on the Honor X14 is a 1920x1200 LCD panel with a 60 Hz refresh rate & 300 nits brightness. The Neo wins here with a Retina display offering a higher resolution of 2408x1506, and 500 nits of peak brightness. Honor also offers 3 USB ports (1x 3.2 Gen2 C & 2x 3.2 Gen1 A), an HDMI port, an audio port, & PD/DP capabilities through the Type-C port. It also comes with a 60Whr battery versus the Neo's 36.5Whr Li-Ion battery.
The Honor X14 measures 311.5 × 215.5 × 16.9mm and weighs 1.39kgs while the MacBook Neo measures 297.5 x 197 x 12.7mm and weighs 1.23 kg. Honor doesn't go into a lot of details about the materials used by its X14 laptop, but we do hope it's a premium finish like the all-aluminum chassis of the Neo.
But the biggest thing to talk about today is the pricing. In China, the laptop has already gone on sale and is listed for as low as 3999 CNY at JD.com, while Honor's official website lists it at 4399. The JD.com listing is actually lower than $600 US while the official price is around $645 US.
Based on the price differences, a similar laptop in the US should easily retail for $599, and we hope to see some $500 US models too, based on the entry-level Core 3 "Wildcat Lake" chips. Overall, a decent start for Intel, but we have to wait for proper reviews as battery life and performance are yet to be measured by independent tests.
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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