After Apple’s M1 launch, Intel announces its own white-label laptop

Its long fruitful relationship with Apple may be sunsetting soon, but Intel’s still got a fairly massive footprint in the PC market. There’s never a good time to get complacent, though (a lesson the company learned the hard way on the mobile front).

This week the chip giant is debuting its own laptop, the NUC M15. More properly, the NUC M15 Laptop Kit; the device is actually a white-label system. It’s essentially a reference design so smaller device makers don’t have to commit to the long and expensive process of building a system from scratch.

It is, as The Verge notes, not the first time the company has created this sort of reference design. It recently created a gaming system to similar ends. But much like the recent MacBooks, the system is designed to offer high performance in a package designed more for productivity.

There are two configurations for the system, featuring either a Core i7 chip coupled with 16GB of RAM or a Core i5 with 8GB of RAM. That will, obviously, be complemented by Windows 10, which will take advantage of the 15.6-inch touchscreen.

Pricing and timing and all of that good stuff will likely depend on which vendors take the system across the finish line.