The Holiday Buying Guide for a Chip-Starved Year: Laptops and Desktops Worth Gifting
With GPUs and consoles nearly impossible to find this holiday season, here's where stock actually exists and what's worth buying.
If you’ve tried to buy a graphics card or a console this year, you already know the story: empty shelves, inflated resale prices, and “notify me when available” buttons that never seem to fire. Heading into the holidays, that scarcity hasn’t eased up much. So this year’s gift guide is less about chasing the hottest GPU and more about steering you toward categories that are actually in stock — and laptops, especially ones built around vertically integrated silicon, are one of the few bright spots.
The obvious headline pick right now is Apple’s redesigned MacBook Pro lineup. The October “Unleashed” event brought back the 14-inch model alongside the 16-inch, both built around the new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips. These aren’t just incremental bumps over the original M1 — the M1 Max in particular is a big jump on paper, with up to 64GB of unified memory and a 32-core GPU, backed by memory bandwidth as high as 400GB/s. That bandwidth number matters more than people give it credit for: it’s a big part of why these machines can push serious GPU and video-encoding workloads without a discrete card burning through a battery in an hour.
Why laptops, specifically
The chip shortage has hit different product categories unevenly. Discrete GPUs and the consoles that depend on similar silicon (and on scalpers with bots) have been brutalized. Laptops using integrated, custom-designed chips — where a company controls its own supply chain and packages CPU, GPU, and memory into one system-on-chip — have fared noticeably better. Apple’s approach with the M1 family is the clearest example: because the graphics capability is baked into the same chip as everything else, there’s no separate GPU line item to go scarce. If you’re shopping for someone who does creative work — video editing, photo work, music production — a 14-inch MacBook Pro with the base M1 Pro is going to be dramatically more available than an equivalent Windows machine promising a discrete mobile GPU that may or may not actually be in the box you receive.
That’s not to say Windows laptops are a dead end this year. Machines with integrated graphics only (no discrete GPU) have generally stayed easier to find, and for anyone whose “gaming” is really just casual or cloud-streamed, that’s a perfectly reasonable gift. Just go in with expectations set correctly — this isn’t the year to promise someone a discrete-GPU gaming laptop at a normal price and have it actually show up on time.
A few practical notes if you’re gift-shopping this week: order early, because carrier and retailer stock on the higher-spec 16-inch M1 Max configurations has been inconsistent, and shipping estimates have been sliding further out the closer we get to the holidays. If you’re buying for someone who mostly needs a reliable, fast machine rather than a maxed-out workstation, the 14-inch with the base M1 Pro is the better value — you’re not paying for GPU cores and memory bandwidth you’ll never touch. And if raw availability is your top priority over any particular spec sheet, ironically, this might be the first holiday season in a while where “just get the Apple laptop” is genuine practical advice rather than a fanboy take.