Meteor Lake laptop retailer listings show competitive pricing — Intel’s next-gen CPUs compete with AMD Zen 4 at all price points

PC hardware leaker momomo_us has found multiple listings for Meteor Lake laptops made by Acer and Asus. Although it's not unusual to see early retail listings for upcoming products, these leaks are remarkable because some have full marketing descriptions, images, specs, and even seemingly accurate pricing.

The most complete listings are for Acer's upcoming laptop, which appears to be a new Swift model. There's a lower-end version with the Core Ultra 5 125H, 16GB of LPDDR5X memory, and a 512GB SSD. Meanwhile, the Core Ultra 7 155H (also coming to the XPS 13) variant has 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. Both laptops come with 14-inch, 2880 x 1800 resolution OLED displays and claim to have a battery life of 11 hours.

But perhaps the price tags are the most exciting part. At two German retailers (Baur and Otto), the Core Ultra 5 125H-powered laptop costs 999 euros ($1,088), while the Core Ultra 7 155H-equipped model costs 1249 euros ($1,360). It is likely to be the final or near-final pricing. Compared to other Acer Swift laptops at the same retailers, these Meteor Lake laptops show regular pricing.

The hardware sleuth also shared a screenshot of prices at a different retailer, which we've deduced to be pc21.fr, listing five upcoming Asus Zenbooks. These laptops will use the Core Ultra 7 155U and the Core Ultra 5 125U rather than the H-class versions Acer puts inside the Swift. These laptops all have 16GB of RAM (likely LPDDR5X), 512GB or 1TB SSDs, and four sport 16-inch screens, with just one using a 13-inch display.

However, it's not clear whether the prices are correct. They're all non-rounded, like the BX5304MA-NQ125X priced at 1,209.10 euros ($1,317) before tax, and although that seems to be the case for all laptops at this retailer, it's just hard to say if this pricing holds up.

We did some sleuthing of our own and found the BX5304MA-NQ125X model at two other retailers. Its price at Pure Gaming (another French retailer) is 1,415.17 euros ($1,541), but its price at Admi Computer (also French) is an even 1,849.99 euros ($2,015). On the one hand, pc21.fr and Pure Gaming seem to agree on the general price, but Admi Computer has a price tag that looks more finalized. If we had to guess, we'd say that the price at Admi Computer is more likely to be a placeholder since other Zenbooks there don't go for nearly 2,000 euros ($2,178), except for the high-end Duo 14.

Although Meteor Lake uses some pretty cutting-edge technology, it looks like laptops that use the new CPU won't be super expensive. That will help Intel get Meteor Lake out there and facilitate the transition from Raptor Lake. However, Intel also needs to make sure it makes a profit, especially as the company only recently returned to profitability. For Intel's sake, hopefully, the margins on Meteor Lake are sufficient.