Chuwi has never been the brand you associate with top-tier hardware: it built its name on budget laptops that punched above their weight at entry-level prices.
The new CoreBook Air 226V is a deliberate step away from the brand’s comfort zone. It’s a sub-1kg Copilot+ PC built around Intel’s Lunar Lake processors, and at $800, it’s asking buyers to trust it with something that it has never before: a premium Windows laptop.
What makes the CoreBook Air 226V worth considering?
For $800, the spec sheet is genuinely compelling. An Intel Core Ultra 5 226V (3nm, up to 4.5 GHz) chipset powers the machine, delivering a combined 97 TOPS of AI compute (40 from the dedicated NPU, the rest from the Arc 130V GPU and CPU).
That’s enough for full Copilot+ functionality: real-time live captions, local AI assistants, background blur, and even voice transcription, entirely on the device. Then comes the 13-inch 2.8K display at 90Hz, which covers 100% of the sRGB color space.
Powering the laptop is a 55Wh battery that claims to provide around 12 to 15 hours of mixed usage. Connectivity options include two Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI 2.0, and three USB-A 3.0 ports. All of this is packed inside an aluminum chassis that weighs around one kilogram.
What about the $800 price tag?
While the CoreBook Air 226V’s spec sheet is quite great, the $800 might not be as compelling. Chuwi is known for affordable products, but this particular model pushes into the mainstream category, competing against established thin-and-light notebook makers with longer track records and much wider retail availability.
Chuwi’s own Ryzen 5 CoreBook Air retails for significantly less, making the $800 tag a test of the brand’s presence and popularity among buyers. Anyway, if you consider the spec-to-price ratio, the CoreBook Air 226V is hard to argue with.
Even if the Intel Lunar Lake chipsets provide a higher compute power, there are plenty of OEMs that undercut the Chuwi’s $800 price tag, the most impactful of them being the Apple MacBook Neo.
