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: 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 14-inch 2.8K display at 90Hz, which covers 100% of the sRGB color space.
Powering the laptop is 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 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.