New laptops are using old CPUs and that’s a problem

One of the core tenets of productivity is to do more with less. But the opposite holds true, too — which a sneaky, pernicious trend permeating the laptop market might reveal.

Microprocessor vendors have begun reusing old silicon, but in a way that obscures that decision from consumers. Shoppers are left trying to figure out whether their productivity laptop is truly new — and should be priced accordingly — or if older hardware is being sold at a premium price.

As I’ve demonstrated, the problem isn’t in actually repurposing old silicon; older chips can be perfectly competent, even now. The issue is how they’re being positioned, and priced. There’s just no easy way to tell whether a new laptop contains a new processor, and it feels like laptop makers are taking advantage of that. Intel’s not totally immune to all of this, but the real culprit is likely AMD, which was recently called out for launching “new” versions of mobile Ryzen processors that it had released several years ago.

For years, the PC industry followed Intel’s lead as it pioneered the “good, better, best” branding using Core i3, i5, i7…and then eventually i9, too. But as chips became more complex, adding integrated graphics, multiple cores and threads, and turbo clock speeds that would kick in when needed, the PC hardware business struggled to communicate this to users. Things got so out of hand that AMD issued “decoder wheels” as something of a joke (but not really) to help people figure out what something like the Ryzen 5 7640U actually included.

Today, whatever rhyme and reason was used to come up with chip branding has been largely discarded.

Take, for example, the AMD Ryzen 8000 series of mobile processors, launched in Dec. 2023. AMD said then that those chips were “architecturally aligned” (basically the same as) with the Ryzen 7000 chips it had launched 12 months before. But in early 2025 AMD renamed those chips the “Ryzen 200” lineup. (You can compare the Ryzen 5 7640HS [launch date: April 30, 2023] and the Ryzen 9 270 for yourself: They share the same Zen 4 architecture.)

Now, it’s 2026, and AMD just launched seven “new” Ryzen 200 parts last month, ranging from the Ryzen 3 205 to the Ryzen 7 253. Again, Zen 4, the same chip architecture AMD launched in January 2023. TweakTown even caught AMD adding four new Ryzen 100 chips that include Zen 3+ “Rembrandt” designs, which goes all the way back to 2022, four years ago. New chips! Based on 4-year-old designs!

Intel’s not totally off the hook. Intel’s Core Ultra brand for laptops now includes desktop chips as well. Intel admitted that its older chips have seen increased demand, but it brought back older hardware called out as updates using code names like “Raptor Lake Refresh” and “Arrow Lake Refresh” chips. That’s a bit more honest, in my book.

In the real world, all of this has an impact. I found Lenovo’s list of ThinkPads being sold with a Ryzen 250 processor inside, for between $900 and $1,000. I’d expect a 3-year-old chip would command bargain-basement prices, but no: $900 isn’t what I’d call cheap, not up against the $600 Dell XPS 13 or the Apple MacBook Neo. Lenovo’s laptops, the XPS 13, and the Neo all include modest configurations, some of which include 8GB of RAM and small SSDs. However, the Neo and XPS use modern chip designs and cost less than the Lenovo laptops, built on the older Ryzen architecture. I don’t like that.

I also hate the lawyerly language that Lenovo uses to imply that these laptops include up-to-date features like “AI experiences” and NPUs. They do, at an anemic 16 TOPS. It’s like those vestigial spare tires that cars come with now. It has one! But…not really.

I originally thought that portraying older hardware as new could be the antithesis of last week’s newsletter, that the best new laptop is an old one. I discarded that idea. All of these laptops are new, with upgrades (1200p displays, for example) that you’d associate with newer machines.

In general, I love how productivity laptops have progressed. I can pick up a productivity laptop, note how light it feels; the arrangement of the ports; how crisp and clean the newer, high-refresh-rate, high-resolution displays appear. They make you want to set them down, boot them up, and start banging away on your to-do list. The specs make sense.

All except one. I’m all for variety in laptops, but I also trust that the differences between them are being clearly communicated. Increasingly, the processor name does the opposite: It conceals, rather than clarifies.

In productivity news

Productivity tip of the week

Baby steps: One of the treatments for depression is to treat life in manageable steps. Make it your goal, for example, to simply get out of bed or to go for a walk. Accomplish that, and you’re done for the day. Even if you’re the opposite — a hyperproductive person — it’s not a bad idea to start out with an easy win. Take the task’s most basic step and complete it.

The idea isn’t that you’ll just stop there — and if you do, that’s fine. Momentum may just carry you along until you’re well on your way to simply getting what you need to get done, done.

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for tuning in to this 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 Thursday!