I entered the COMPUTEX season this year expecting to be bored. Another spin around the AI carousel, another wall of slides with the word agetic on them, another keynote where someone holds up a chip and tells me it’s the most important thing to happen since the fire. And sure enough, some of that is coming. But the more I dig into what’s scheduled for Taipei from June 2nd to the 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. Let me take you through what I enjoy.
NVIDIA is finally making a laptop chip, and that’s a big deal
The best-kept secret in technology right now is that NVIDIA is about to jump into laptop processors. NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Arm have all been posting the same “New era of PC” tease, complete with map links that take you to the location where Jensen Huang is giving his keynote on Sunday night (or Monday morning if you’re in Taipei). When three companies of this size coordinate such a mockery, they do not encourage a small announcement.
The chip that everyone is waiting for is called the N1X, an Arm-based part developed by MediaTek. What makes me lean forward is the GPU side of it. This isn’t NVIDIA strapping a weak integrated graphics chip onto a CPU and calling it a day—the rumored design is paired with a serious processor and a Blackwell-class GPU. If that goes through, it will be the first time a Windows-on-Arm laptop can handle real-time gaming, video editing, and heavy AI work without a separate graphics card. It’s the holy grail laptop makers have been chasing for years, and it’s frankly something Qualcomm has never done.
There’s a knock effect that I like here too. NVIDIA’s move to Windows-on-Arm breaks Qualcomm’s exclusive hold on the market. More players, more stress, better laptops for us. Competition is the best thing that can happen in the stationary phase.
Just keep your expectations honest: this is still pre-launch. Specs leaks, product slips, and “does everything right” are a promise that no Arm laptop has fully kept to date. I’ll believe the dGPU-free gaming dream when I see real games running on real hardware. But the direction is interesting.
The MacBook Neo lights a fire under everyone
Another issue I can’t stop thinking about is what happens at the cheap end. Apple’s $599 MacBook Neo has rocked the entire PC industry, and the answer will be all over the COMPUTEX show floor.
Acer has already shown the answer in the form of a $699 laptop that uses Intel silicon, and Qualcomm has a new line of chips called Snapdragon C—the “C” stands for “compute,” which is about as appealingly blunt as product placement gets—aimed squarely at affordable laptops. I find this battle more interesting than another $3,000 halo machine, because it’s the part that determines what most people end up buying. When a $599 laptop forces these giants to scratch, you know the ideal floor has just been raised for everyone.
Related: MacBook Neo vs. M5 MacBook Air: Here’s what changes when Apple uses a phone chip
A small warning I can give if you are buying a budget category: watch the RAM. Some of these aggressive price points come with 8 GB of memory, and the 2026 is what I will seriously consider before buying a new one.
Portables are temporary (expensive)
Intel is making a real play for gaming consoles this year with its Arc G3 and G3 Extreme chips, built on the same Panther Lake architecture as its new laptop processors. We’ve already seen the system building MSI’s new Claw, Acer’s Predator Atlas, and OneXPlayer 3 are all expected to use these components.
AMD has this slot almost by default, so I’m rooting for Intel to make it a real battle. My honest hope here isn’t horsepower—it’s battery life. The eternal curse of these little machines is shooting a game so you can watch it die in 90 minutes, and a more efficient build is exactly what can fix that.
The thing I always stress about, though, is the price. Between the wide memory situation and the recent Steam Deck price increase, I don’t expect any of this to be cheap. None of the developers have committed to numbers yet, which tells you something about how nervous everyone is.
Memory prices are scary
Here is a storm cloud over the whole system. Memory and storage costs have gone straight. The local price of certain memory products rose more than 600% last year, according to data from InSpectrum, and IDC projects memory revenue to rise to nearly $800 billion next year as AI datacenters leapfrog and pay whatever it takes to get it. Industry sources warn that these problems may not subside until the end of 2027.
What does that mean to me and you? Higher prices for basically everything with a chip in it, and a real squeeze on the affordable end where margins are already thin. It’s an unsavory backdrop to all the shiny launches in Taipei, and it’s the reason many companies block questions about pricing. When I review anything announced this week, the memory configuration and cost are the first things I’ll want pinned down—because a great sheet doesn’t mean much if something comes at a price nobody can take.
What I’m looking for
So this is where I got to. The title will be NVIDIA’s keynote, and rightly so – a credible third choice for Windows laptops is the kind of change that is reshaping the next few years of computing. But the quiet story, the budget-laptop controversy started by the MacBook Neo, could be more important to many people’s wallets.
What I love about COMPUTEX is that it’s still a show where hardware makers get weird and ambitious, and in 2026, the personal computer—something on your desk or in your bag, not some hyperscaler warehouse—commands attention again. After a few years in the golden shade of AI, the PC is the protagonist again.
My advice is simple. Don’t panic buy anything, see how the price will move when the dust settles, and don’t ignore the spec-sheet specs and which of these promises actually deliver. The hype is high. The good news is that, once again, the hardware may live up to it.
Grigor Baklajyan is a technical copywriter at . His contributions include product reviews, buying guides, how-to articles, and more.