Cheap laptops from smartphone factories: Project Firefly aims to make Wildcat Lake more affordable

Intel Wildcat Lake is intended to counter the Apple MacBook Neo ($589 on Amazon). The first laptops based on the low-cost Intel chips, such as the Honor Notebook X14 and the Chuwi UniBook, are already cheaper than Apple's entry-level laptop, and prices could fall further in the future. This is because Intel has announced Project Firefly, an initiative that will make it possible to use the smartphone supply chain to produce low-cost laptops.

To this end, Intel is resorting to greater standardization of many components. Mainboards, connectors, battery and the like are to be modular and easy to assemble in factories to enable different laptop designs. Costs are to be reduced by using the infrastructure already available in smartphone supply chains. As the photos from Golden Pig Upgrade show, Intel has presented a reference design that looks quite modern with particularly thin display bezels, a gigantic trackpad and a thickness of just 1.1 centimeters.

However, such a thin metal chassis will inevitably increase costs. Project Firefly could become very important in the market for low-cost laptops over the next few years, as prices are likely to continue to rise for the foreseeable future due to the worsening DRAM crisis. Provided that Intel does not abandon Project Firefly as quickly as Firefly was discontinued. Wildcat Lake chips, such as the Intel Core 5 320, are somewhat slower than the Apple A18 Pro of the MacBook Neo, but can deliver usable performance for office and web tasks when combined with fast LPDDR5X-7467 memory.