As an undergraduate engineering student living in Malaysia who loves building projects and gaming, I’ve been looking to upgrade my current setup, a basic laptop running an i5-13500H with only integrated graphics for a while now. However, the hardware market over the last few months has become incredibly depressing.
Just a few months ago, $1,700 USD could get Lenovo Legion 5i with an i9-14900HX, an RTX 5070, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage. Today, that same budget can only get a HP Omen 16 with an RTX 5060, same amount of RAM and storage and the low quality version 2K display. And the fact that the same Legion 5i costs $2,200 USD now.
It leaves me stuck in a frustrating limbo of whether if I overpay now or do I try to wait it out, knowing logically that even if production somehow is able to increase or the “AI bubble” ends in who knows how many years, manufacturers will likely try to turn these inflated prices into the new norm.