I’m just going to say it: 2026 is the most exciting year for productivity laptops ever.
I’ve been covering the chip market dating back to the winter of 1994. Celeron? I was there. Intel’s first integrated GPU, the i740? I said it stunk — and Intel blacklisted me for it. When Transmeta came, and went, I was the guy who quietly snuck a peek at the first performance estimates.
Now it’s 2026, and look at what you have to choose from in laptops! For years, it was Intel and AMD only. Now, you can buy laptops with two chips from Intel (Panther Lake and now Wildcat Lake), AMD’s Ryzen AI 400, the Snapdragon X1 and X2 in their myriad configurations, plus Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon C — and the sexy newcomer, Nvidia’s RTX Spark.
Welcome to the inaugural edition of PCWorld’s latest newsletter, Smart Mode! The focus of this newsletter is productivity: from software to hardware to peripherals, all with the idea to get what you need to get done, efficiently.
I’m your host, Mark Hachman, covering the productivity tips, tools, and trends that you need to know about, both from within PCWorld and beyond. If you want the latest issue in your inbox each week, just sign up right here.
All this has kept me busy. I’ve been able to review Intel’s Panther Lake pretty thoroughly, and discovered that it’s only great under certain conditions. Without proper cooling, Panther turns into a kitten. Qualcomm pushed all its chips into the pot with the Snapdragon X2 Elite, going all in on performance and sacrificing some battery life in exchange.
For this inaugural newsletter, I wanted to give you a first look at AMD’s new Ryzen AI 400 chip, before it hits PCWorld’s pages. AMD anoounced the Ryzen AI 400 series in January without a lot of fanfare; it pushed the CPU and GPU frequency higher, but that’s all. If you wanted to buy the best overall productivity laptop, the previous Ryzen AI 300 was a good bet. Ryzen AI 400 notebooks are out now, but they haven’t received too much attention.
Acer sent me a 16-inch Swift Go 16 AI for review and testing, and I’ve begun to run to run a number of tests on it. I’m not going to overload with you with charts and graphs. Instead, here are the most interesting bits I’ve found so far:
- This laptop (and chip) is absolutely top-notch when run under load. Both Cinebench (CPU) and 3DMark (GPU) provide looped stress tests that track how performance degrades when run at full speed over time. CPU performance actually nudged up a tiny bit (statistically the same) and GPU performance didn’t diminish at all — the final loop of a 20-run test was 99.5% the performance of the first.
- As a corollary, this laptop runs cool and very quiet. There’s a fan, sure. But Acer and AMD did a great job here.
- Performance, though, is…pretty bad. But this is a Ryzen AI 7 445, with 6 cores and 12 threads, versus the 12 cores and 24 threads of the top-of-the-line Ryzen AI 9 HX 475.
- Unplug it, though, and it gets worse. Application and CPU performance drops about 45 percent, and graphics performance drops about 29 percent. This is also not a very fast 3D graphics chip at all.
The actual numbers and battery scores will have to wait for our review, but it looks like I’ve been handed a midrange laptop with Intel “Meteor Lake” performance.
More in productivity this week:
- I almost wrote about Project Firefly, Intel’s quiet attempt to reinvent the mainstream laptop. There’s a lot to chew on: Intel is taking aim at the MacBook Neo in terms of construction and price, and there’s already prototypes Intel is showing off. One to watch!
- My Surface Laptop 8 for Business review: way, way, overpriced.
- Next up: Microsoft’s Surface Pro and Surface Laptop for consumers! With an exclusive Microsoft interview, to boot.
- Microsoft is now recognizing that the AI productivity features within Windows don’t need a NPU. Finally!
- Speaking of Windows AI tools, let’s hope your PC has this one. Seriously. (With exclusive testing.)
- Cheap productivity PCs are hot! And so AMD is shipping “new” laptop chips that are… wait, seven years old?
- Most laptop docking stations don’t include wireless charging for a good reason, but this Baseus dock pulls it off regardless. My hands-on.
- I love Vivaldi’s browser, and the latest version does one thing really right: It killed every ad dead.
Productivity tip of the week: Take a walk
I do two key things to start my day: shower, and take a walk. A landmark Stanford study found walking — anywhere, really — has extremely positive outcomes for creativity and problem solving. I used to walk at night, but I found that walking during the morning better set the stage for a productive day.
Why do I include a shower, then? Hygiene, of course! But both scenarios remove me from any distractions. Sometimes inspiration does hit like the proverbial bolt of lightning, but I find I’m better served by letting ideas percolate. My job is to connect trends and discover good ideas for stories and articles, and the mental freedom to let the pieces fall into place gives me a better perspective. Anyone can react, but being proactive is what sets productive people apart.
Thanks for reading!
Thanks for tuning in to the first edition of Smart Mode, PCWorld’s newsletter devoted to helping you make the most of your life, smartly. Sign up and have it sent to your inbox every Tuesday!
