5 powerful laptops cheaper than the MacBook Air after price hike

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Due to the rising costs of memory and storage chips driven by the AI ​​boom, Apple recently increased the prices of MacBooks and iPads. Because of this, the entry-level MacBook Neo now starts at $699 (up from $599), while the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air have jumped $200, from $1,099 to $1,299 and $1,299 to $1,499, respectively. This makes the MacBook Air a bit expensive if you want a budget laptop that’s powerful enough for everyday tasks.

However, if you’re looking for a powerful laptop, you don’t necessarily have to get the MacBook Air. With Apple’s price hike, the company just made some budget laptops more attractive than they once were. In fact, you can even consider buying used laptops that are still worth buying.

But if you prefer your tech brand new, here are five powerful laptops that are now inferior to the MacBook Air while offering more or less the same features, like a lightweight design and competitive battery life. We selected these laptops largely based on their current market prices, but you can read more about our selection process at the end of the article.

Starting at $1,399, the Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 is slightly cheaper than the 15-inch MacBook Air after the price hike. It is powered by Qualcomm’s latest second-generation Snapdragon X2 Plus chip and is available in various configurations.

The Snapdragon The base model of the Yoga Slim 7x Gen 11 comes with 16GB of memory, 512GB of storage, and a 14-inch FHD+ OLED panel.

However, this laptop has limited ports: it only has three USB-C ports, and it doesn’t even have a headphone jack, unlike the Air. Although it currently sells for $100 less than the 15-inch MacBook Air, the price continues to fluctuate and we’ve seen it as low as $1,200, which is a fantastic price.

Although Microsoft’s 13-inch Surface Laptop initially started at $899 when it hit the market in 2025, the company was one of the victims of the memory crisis and was forced to raise prices. The 13-inch Surface Laptop now starts at $1,199 for the variant with 16GB of memory and 256GB of storage, which is still $100 cheaper than the MacBook Air 13.

The Surface model in question runs Qualcomm’s 8-core Snapdragon X Plus processor. While this chip isn’t as powerful as Apple’s M5 chip that powers the MacBook Air, it’s still quite capable by modern standards, especially if you’re not doing CPU- or GPU-intensive tasks.

In addition to the Snapdragon

The HP OmniBook 5 is available in different configurations, with some selling for more than the Air while others cost less. So whether it’s cheaper than the MacBook Air depends on the specific configuration you choose. The variant with a Qualcomm Snapdragon

This variant costs $1,450 as of this writing, making it $50 cheaper. The Snapdragon X Plus is a pretty capable chip, as we highlighted previously. Additionally, what makes this variant of the HP OmniBook 5 even more appealing is that it has double the memory compared to the base 15-inch MacBook Air, which only comes with 16GB of RAM.

HP’s OmniBook 5 also offers an OLED touchscreen and a more versatile port selection than the Air, with two USB-C ports, a single USB-A port, and a headphone jack. With a similar screen size to the 15-inch MacBook Air, the OmniBook 5 is also portable, weighing 3.52 pounds, slightly heavier than the 15-inch Air but only by 0.2 pounds.

Asus has updated its iconic ZenBook A14 laptop this year, giving it a performance boost. It retains the same design but benefits from slightly new internals in the form of the Snapdragon That makes it $149 cheaper than the new 15-inch MacBook Air starting price of $1,499.

With Qualcomm’s 18-core Snapdragon X2 Elite chip under the hood, this laptop is just as powerful, if not more so, than the M5 MacBook Air. According to Windows Central’s testing, the ZenBook A14 performed better than an M5-equipped MacBook Pro (yes, the Pro, not the Air) on Geekbench 6. Therefore, you won’t be compromising on performance even if you opt for less.

The ZenBook A14 features a 14-inch FHD+ OLED display and gives you a wide assortment of ports, including an HDMI 2.1 port, three USB ports (two USB-C and one USB-A), and a headphone jack. It weighs just 2.4 pounds, making it lighter than the smaller and lighter 13-inch MacBook Air, not to mention the larger and bulkier 15-inch model at 3.3 pounds. That said, the ZenBook A14 isn’t the only one that deserves such bragging rights: there are other laptops that are lighter than the MacBook Air.

The Lenovo Slim 7i Aura Edition is part of the company’s line of ultra-light laptops. In addition to rivaling the MacBook Air in terms of portability, it weighs just 2.82 pounds, making it slightly heavier than the 13-inch model at 2.7 pounds. The Lenovo Slim 7i Aura Edition costs $1,156 on Amazon, which means it was more expensive than the 13-inch MacBook Air before the price hike. In terms of performance, this laptop is powered by the Intel Core Ultra 7 256V processor.

Although it’s an upper midrange chip in Intel’s Lunar Lake family, performance is good enough for a productivity laptop, and it can even hold its own in gaming, according to PC Mag’s tests. While the performance isn’t even better than the M3 chip, let alone the M5 chip in the MacBook Air, it should be good enough for everyday tasks. In other areas, the Slim 7i Aura Edition features a 14-inch OLED panel with a 16:10 aspect ratio, offering more vertical space, 16GB of memory and 1TB of storage.

The ports are numerous compared to the MacBook Air: an HDMI 2.1 port, a microSD card reader, two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, a USB-A port and a headphone jack. There’s also a 32GB RAM variant of the Lenovo Slim 7i Aura Edition with 1TB of storage and a touchscreen for $1,400, which is cheaper than the 15-inch MacBook Air.

To put together this list of laptops, the first selection criterion was to find laptops powerful enough to perform everyday tasks without lag or stutter. Price was the second factor we considered. However, we weren’t just looking for cheaper alternatives to the MacBook Air. We only considered laptops that were originally priced higher than the Air, but became cheaper after Apple’s price hike. This way, any models that were previously more user-friendly than the Air were off the list.

One thing you should note about the prices we’ve listed is that they may have changed by the time you read this because tech prices have become volatile in 2026. Some companies have already announced multiple rounds of price hikes. For example, Raspberry Pi has increased the prices of its products several times since last year.