Qualcomm has promised $300 Windows laptops with the new Snapdragon C

They started at $1,000. Then $700. So $600 budget machine. Now, Qualcomm says the price of Windows-based Windows laptops will hit $300 this year.

Although Ramageddon hasn’t dropped yet and as PC prices continue to rise, the company says it’s built a new laptop platform called Snapdragon C — the “C” as in “Compute” — to keep entry-level laptops affordable.

“With Snapdragon C, we’re raising what budget-conscious laptop buyers should expect,” Qualcomm’s chief product officer Mandar Deshpande told reporters at a press conference. “You get the best of audio systems, seamless performance, browsing, video playback, streaming, multitasking, everything.” Until now, get everything has been A tall order even at $600. Can these laptops really cut it? MacBook Neo up to half?

The new laptops should also have “all-day battery life,” “no fan noise,” and be “a laptop that works,” Deshpande added.

Qualcomm and its partners are cutting parts to reach $300. The new platform does not use Qualcomm Oryon CPU cores which supports all its latest Windows laptops and smartphone chips, for example, but instead comes from aged Kryo cores found in older phones and Chromebooks.

And while “even the smallest part” will now have an NPU for local AI computing, it won’t meet the requirements of Microsoft’s Copilot Plus PC for all its AI devices, the company admits.

Acer, HP, and Lenovo are the first partners. Acer is making a light announcement today: the Acer Aspire Go 15 AG15-Q31P. It’s a 15.6-inch 1080p laptop with “up to” 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, with two “general purpose” USB-C ports, a USB-A port, an HDMI 1.4 port, Wi-Fi 6E, a 1080p webcam, and a 53Wh battery.

Acer isn’t sharing details, a release date, or price yet, and neither HP nor Lenovo have shared models today. But he should send it this year.

Qualcomm isn’t sharing details about the Snapdragon C platform itself, though Deshpande says the company will be ready to do so in a few months. He says several laptops are growing. At the moment, the company is only announcing the Snapdragon C for Windows laptops, saying that it is not ready to talk about Googlebooks today.