Up to $2,400: High-end Intel Panther Lake laptops are expensive with pricing reportedly comparable to AMD Strix Halo laptops

[Redaktion]

Intel Panther Lake has managed to impress with its strong power efficiency, multi-core performance, and outstanding graphics performance. However, these qualities reportedly come at a steep price. According to Moore's Law Is Dead, high-end Panther Lake laptops cost more than $2,000.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Up-to-2-400-High-end-Intel-Panther-Lake-laptops-are-expensive-with-pricing-reportedly-comparable-to-AMD-Strix-Halo-laptops.1217820.0.html

[DS27]

Intel is lost. They think they're some premium crap.

[Hegarmin]

Intel is lost. They think they're some premium crap.

Lost how? what do you want them to do? sell at a loss or something? it's not like they have an actual competitor. people can yap about Strix Halo all they want, it's still an irrelevant product wiht very low volume. there are more Panther Lake laptops announced in one month than Strix Halo laptops announced since CES 2025. and many big OEMs didn't even launch their products yet. wait until Q2, then the topic becomes relevant. Lenovo will have comparable products with both Panther Lake and Strix Halo (if they even manage to launch that Legion 7). we will be able to compare prices more accurately.

[Be reasonable]

Whenever a company launches a new chip they always put it in premium designs. So they can charge higher prices for larger profits. This is standard practice for all companies, not intel specific.

Remember, when halo first launched? They stuck it in a premium tablet design and and expensive business notebook at first. Same logic. Now they're bringing it to more budget tuf a14 series, a year later.

[Joe]

Yeah, it will take another year or two for this and Strix Halo to be more affordable while Intel and AMD work on successors. Add to that Nvidia jumping into the CPU market with N1X chips. Things are about to get very exciting.

[opckieran]

Even if 388H costs close to Strix Halo, they are 2 very different classes of laptop.

Thin and Light, Luxury-class laptop

or

Various form-factor, Middle-class/gaming laptop



Still waiting to see how 358H and 338H laptops are priced. 358H is basically within 5% of 388H in terms of performance anyways. While pre-orders for 358H laptops started at $1299 for 32GB of RAM, it wouldn't surprise me to see those prices stabilize $100-200 higher over the next 3-6 months.

[Dilemmause]

That is a tough one.
Same price:
HP ZBook Ultra G1a(2.8K, Max+395,128GB)
1.5 KG
vs
Lenovo X1 Carbon gen 14 (2.8K, X7, 64GB)
1.1KG
vs
Asus ExpertBook Ultra (X9, 64GB)
1.1KG

[well]

Weight aside, one can get a used/refurbished faster 4060 laptop for 700-800 and new for just slightly more. B390 laptop for 700 when/ever? And how fast would it be, as we still don't know if Intel allows makers for limit the Watt consumption (some GeForce laptops may perform slower, they have a lower Watt consumption and same could be the case for B390). Another metric could be this: FPS per weight.

[Pessimist]

Being a pessimist, I can only list the negatives:

X1 Carbon seems to have the worst cooling / thermal dissipation (only 30W). Do note it also has the smallest battery capacity, smaller than many handhelds even.

Asus is just Asus. Have they even fixed the stuttering due to bios firmware that has been affecting all their laptops for years yet? Panel looks super grainy too. (X9 config? Going to be pricy, but then again choosing 64GB, guess this isn't much of a concern here)

G1a..just no. I don't even want to begin. The battery life on that 2.8k is really bad. And the 1080p version is a really mediocre panel that barely gets bright enough indoors, adjusts non-linearly, iirc too. The keyboard is meh, personally not into it but can't really explain what was wrong besides that I much prefer lenovo's. Avg speakers. I don't know what MLID smoking recommending it but it's overrated (imo).

[opckieran]

Weight aside, one can get a used/refurbished faster 4060 laptop for 700-800 and new for just slightly more. B390 laptop for 700 when/ever? And how fast would it be, as we still don't know if Intel allows makers for limit the Watt consumption (some GeForce laptops may perform slower, they have a lower Watt consumption and same could be the case for B390). Another metric could be this: FPS per weight.

Hard to imagine a 4060/5050 laptop for 900 being particularly good. Even a quality machine at 1200-1300 would be significantly heavier with much worse battery life.

[B390]

X1 Carbon seems to have the worst cooling / thermal dissipation (only 30W).

notebookcheck.net/Intel-Panther-Lake-Arc-B390-performance-and-efficiency-analysis-Intel-s-new-iGPU-trades-blows-with-the-Nvidia-GeForce-RTX-4050.1212582.0.html:
The good thing about the B390 is that at a 28W and 20W power limit, it has the highest power efficiency.

[Martin Despodov]

I've lived long enough for windows machines to surpass Apple in price. As much as I like the idea of such a PC that does not have compatibility issues and does not compromise performance for battery, I cannot justify giving so much money away for a portable machine that logically could not surpass stationary ones, especially given the state the os is in right now. This hardware is wasted away on software that is really behind. If Intel wants to take Apple 's clientele, they have to turn to Microsoft to optimize the software, to actually make certain their make machines that could work flawlessly for longer. Only then would it be actually viable to invest top dollar for a windows laptop

[opckieran]

I've lived long enough for windows machines to surpass Apple in price. As much as I like the idea of such a PC that does not have compatibility issues and does not compromise performance for battery, I cannot justify giving so much money away for a portable machine that logically could not surpass stationary ones, especially given the state the os is in right now. This hardware is wasted away on software that is really behind. If Intel wants to take Apple 's clientele, they have to turn to Microsoft to optimize the software, to actually make certain their make machines that could work flawlessly for longer. Only then would it be actually viable to invest top dollar for a windows laptop

Windows machines surpassed Apple in price a long time ago to be honest. Apple themselves have been dragging their price down these last few years; a new (as in current-gen, not just off-the-shelf) 16GB MacBook went from $999 to $799 although thanks to DRAM/SSD price increases that's likely to shoot back up. And unfortunately for Intel, the Wintel alliance from the 2000s is basically gone. M$ sees the writing on the wall: the aging x86 will be eventually pushed out by ARM in the PC space. I'd argue that more software devs are writing for ARM platforms already and have been for years anyways, thanks to the smartphone. Intel tried to make their own Linux Distro (Clear Linux) which was supposed to be super optimized for their platforms, but they dropped it a few years ago.

Either way, as bad as Windows has become, I'm more than happy to buy 1-2 year old platforms and run Linux on them, as by then they're 99%+ compatible. I'm not in any rush.