I don’t even really think it’s “fine.” It’s hard to even understand who they are for. Just Josh Tech on YouTube did a great review of these laptops as they’re hitting the market.

Good battery life is probably the biggest upside, but the Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Zephyrus G16 is just about as good (more on that alternative later).

The downsides are numerous:

- Middling GPU performance compared to discrete RTX mobile GPUs. You’re barely trading blows with an 5070Ti with the top end Spark chip. And yes, Nvidia markets RTX Spark for gaming, so we need to judge them in that context, too. Windows on ARM isn’t amazing for gaming for various reasons including lack of anti-cheat compatibility.

- Compatibility and/or performance issues on Windows ARM. You’re running a lot of stuff non-native

- As you mentioned, the CPU cores are nothing to write home about with very mid single core performance.

- Suffers greatly from “why am I not buying a MacBook Pro?” syndrome

- Poor/no Linux support, in a world where when Linux and Mac get the most attention for AI workflows.

I think there may be a case for being a good performance value for AI training, but for local inference I’m not seeing how that makes sense. Heck, for local inference I think it’s better to run a workstation as a server and then use the laptop as a client. You benefit from a better hardware value as well as putting less of the strain on the laptop, saving battery life. The fact that it’s plugged in means you can run long-running jobs and scheduled tasks, which is often the strength of local AI. The cost of one of these RTX Spark laptops will get you a dual R9700 inference workstation if you’re smart about the build.

You’ve also got projects like Strata that are going to define trends for how people run local AI. Why bother with $6000 integrated graphics machines or trying to squeeze quality models into one or two expensive 24-32GB GPUs when you can get 60 tok/s on Qwen 3.8 Flash Next on a 16GB RX 9060XT ($500) with 64GB of DDR4 RAM?

Want to do local inference on a laptop? Grab a Zephyrus G16, get the 64GB/RTX 5080 spec, run Strata, then as a bonus you can run AAA games at full blast. This costs less than $5000.

Waiting ~1 year for the M7 Pro chip on MacBook Pro models is another option that is almost certainly a better idea if the rumors about that chip are true.

I’m struggling to find a way to find a worse value buying something, anything that isn’t an RTX Spark. For that money there are just so many alternatives.

Yeah but this is all there is until what 2028? 2029? And those could cost 2x-3x too.

I feel like even if a next generation of chips dropped tomorrow, it'd be a while until they can scale up production and actually start selling products you or I could realistically purchase and by that time this new generation chip would already by a couple of years old with something much better and powerful in the final stages of design.

If it's anything like my DGX Spark, the "premium" is almost 100% just the memory cost, not the GPU or ARM core.

10 months ago when I got my Spark it was competitive in price with a similarly spec'd out Mac Studio. As RAM prices have gone even more parabolic, so has its price. And so has the Mac's. And the Strix Halo competitors.

May always be behind with how fast things change, you think?