I love the MSI Claw A8, but its price proves PC handhelds are officially going off the rails — here's why

Tom's Guide

7 hours ago

There's a very real chance that PC gaming handhelds could cost a thousand dollars as standard, and the pre-order pricing for the MSI Claw A8 with AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme proves it.
As confirmed by MSI, the new handheld is launching this month, and preorders have started in Asia on MSI's store, and the price given is 6,999 RMB. There is a lower price, that's offered via the Chinese government's 15% subsidy on consumer tech, which means you could get it for 5,949 RMB.
But when flipped to USD, that subsidized cost is just under $740, and without, that skyrockets to $860. Pop sales tax on top and we're talking a thousand bucks.
Now I know gaming handhelds can be expensive, but if we're at a point where they could be vastly more expensive than vastly more powerful gaming laptops, something's gone wrong here.
If you want my personal recommendations on what to get instead, tap here to jump on down to those (including some tasty Prime Day deals). But for those of you who want more context on what just got revealed, let's talk about it.
Everything seems largely the same as what I tested at Computex — giant 80Wh battery, all the same ports, a 1200p display (which we now know has a 500-nit peak brightness). But seeing WiFi 7 is a surprise.
Previously, MSI confirmed to me that this was rocking WiFi 6E, so for online gaming, this has now become an altogether stronger machine. I'm a big fan of that.
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That doesn't take away from the inflationary pressure being felt by this potential price. Of course, there will be a variation . We're talking about the price in China here, with one version coming with the government's 15% subsidy, and the higher price including sales tax.
But with the current global climate, I dare say that we could see that price go up. For example, the Intel-based MSI Claw 8 AI+ is priced the same as this AMD counterpart in China.
The MSRP over here is $999, and when you take into account just what kind of gaming hardware you could get for a thousand bucks, that's where I start to fear that PC gaming handhelds are going off the rails. And it makes me especially nervous about the ROG Xbox Ally X.
The simple answer is get a gaming laptop. But allow me to go into both scenarios here:
Don't let that 0.9-inch thinness deceive you — the MSI Thin is a powerful beast with AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS, RTX 4060 GPU, 16GB of super fast DDR5 RAM and a spacious 1TB SSD. Pair that with a 15-inch 1080p 144Hz display for fluid gaming and you've got a stellar system at its cheapest ever price.
Inside, you get an Intel Core i5-13420H CPU, RTX 4050, 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a 512GB SSD. This is enough to run AAA games at 1080p medium settings and squeeze 60 FPS out of them.
In my hands-on time with the MSI Claw A8, I talked about how pricing being unknown makes me a bit nervous. Looking at the decent performance gains with AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme in a bubble of not thinking about cost was impressive, but the price tag has to be fair.
And put simply, if this pricing translates the way I'm thinking over to the U.S. and U.K., this ain't it. Handheld gaming does come with a premium, I get that. But not this kind of premium.
If the Steam Deck proved anything, it's that you can get surprisingly impressive gaming performance from lower power (and lower cost) internals. And I can only cross my fingers and hope that $1,000 doesn't become the new defacto standard for handhelds.