It’s that time of the year, folks, and laptops are raining from the heavens, with every tech brand and their nan trying to get in on the fun. It’s not an easy time to stand out, either, with CES in full swing and the announcements coming thick and fast.
Still, I can’t help but admit that I was properly impressed by what MSI showed me when I got an early briefing on its CES launches in December – and the final announcement underlines that its new hardware marks quite a big departure compared to previous years.
Of course, that’s partly down to the new components inside, with Intel’s latest generation of chips playing a starring role, but my real focus is on a set of new designs that make MSI’s best gaming laptops immediately level up as contenders in the high-end market. Gone are many of the gamerish stylings that can put off those who value discretion, and in come new curves and stealthier accents that make them seriously alluring.
The star of the show, for my money, is the 2026 version of the MSI Stealth 16 AI+, which has the most radical design shift I’ve seen from the brand in ages. I really liked the 2025 18-inch version of this laptop, which is important context, and its toned-down looks were already decent then.
Now, though, the Stealth 16 could pass for a MacBook Pro at a glance, with smoother curves, almost no RGB outside of the keyboard backlight, and a very subtle decal on the back panel.
It’s a brilliant redesign, as far as I’m concerned, and I can’t wait to get my hands on a full review sample to do some gaming and see how it stacks up in terms of performance.
MSI’s not just making a new Stealth, though – the Raider 16 Max HX is also redesigned, and is also sleeker for it. It hasn’t fully abandoned its stylings of old, but it’s definitely a more stealthy machine than before, and is, of course, the most powerful in the whole lineup from MSI. In fact, at 300W of power when running at its peak (with a third internal fan added to keep things cool), it can be the most powerful gaming laptop on the market in the right circumstances.
Since Nvidia hasn’t yet rocked up with a new generation of laptop GPUs to put in these new laptops, the focus is more on Intel’s new Panther Lake chips, which will indeed be available to be specced into them. It’s not the easiest sell, in some ways, to explain why the next-gen chips are better, but the main focus is on efficiency.
Performance uplift can be pretty minimal, from early benchmarking, but power efficiency is coming on in major leaps, which could be more than a little significant for the productivity potential of gaming laptops. Gaming on battery power, after all, will still be a draining exercise, but getting an extra hour or more of emails or work could be the difference in some circumstances.
MSI also has a heap of other machines to launch, it almost goes without saying. There are new notebooks in its Prestige and Modern lineups, with some of its other sub-brands going the way of the dodo to simplify things for consumers.
Again, they’re impressively sleek and genuinely do change the outlook for MSI in terms of shelf appeal, I’d say, but whether they can help it make a proper dent in the productivity market will be interesting to observe.
