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Review: Chuwi's $449 Unibook laptop is a funhouse-mirror MacBook Neo

arstechnica.com

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Re: Review: Chuwi's $449 Unibook laptop is a funhouse-mirror MacBook Neo

#31

Post by collabs »

varun_ch wrote: post #4
freetonik wrote: post #3

>The Unibook’s keyboard is pretty good, and its trackpad is pretty bad. Just like 98% of non-Apple laptops. Amazing how after all these years nobody could replicate the feel of macbook's trackpads.

The new Framework Pro laptop is supposed to be pretty good. Anyone have any experience with it yet?

I have not tried it myself and I'm skeptical of reviewers on the topic of touchpad. I remember sitting next to someone who seemed to be using Photoshop in a MacBook professionally like literally making fine edits with a cursor more than ten years ago.

While I'm sure our track pads have gotten better, I doubt we have reached the level of Apple's track pads.

I don't know how much of an accolade I can give a USD 2k+ device for having almost the same trackpad experience as a USD 999 MacBook.

Re: Review: Chuwi's $449 Unibook laptop is a funhouse-mirror MacBook Neo

#32

Post by fogx »

nsonha wrote: post #28
televisionsaval wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the whole trackpad idea is stupid and unusable (like anything that needs software correction for physical layout idiocy) and I blame Apple for its prevalence. Apple could make an entirely worthless product and within 4 years everyone would have to copy it.

Not to support the idea that good touchpad is apple’s monopoly, but I and most people I know stop having wrist pains by giving up the mouse. If we’re talking about a stupid idea that’s both inefficient and a health hazard, the mouse is it. All the other pointing devices (trackball, trackpoint, rolling mouse etc) make sense one way or another

Yea, moving the burden from your wrists to your finger joints is surely a genius idea and the epitome of health

Re: Review: Chuwi's $449 Unibook laptop is a funhouse-mirror MacBook Neo

#33

Post by card_zero »

bschwindHN wrote: post #27
televisionsaval wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the whole trackpad idea is stupid and unusable (like anything that needs software correction for physical layout idiocy) and I blame Apple for its prevalence. Apple could make an entirely worthless product and within 4 years everyone would have to copy it.

That's like, your opinion man. The trackpad is a fantastic input device. I use it exclusively when on a laptop, and on a desktop I'll use both a mouse and a trackpad.

Hmm, a novel style. What determines which you use at any given time? Do you just switch back and forth at random to keep things interesting?

Re: Review: Chuwi's $449 Unibook laptop is a funhouse-mirror MacBook Neo

#34

Post by ndiddy »

codingisfreedom wrote: post #10

I will never buy another laptop with less than a 500 nits display, no matter its specs/price. I can’t believe virtually every other manufacturer is still making laptops with 250-300 nits. Spending a full day looking at a dim, washed-out screen is just the worst experience ever. The fact that out of all manufacturers, Apple, which is considered the “expensive” and “premium” brand, made the Neo with 500 nits at that pr…

The Neo is $250 more than the Chuwi laptop in the article. Obviously you're going to need to make sacrifices to hit that price point.

Re: Review: Chuwi's $449 Unibook laptop is a funhouse-mirror MacBook Neo

#35

Post by pizza234 »

pizza234 wrote: post #18
fifticon wrote: post #15

this is another data point in my "year of the linux desktop"; linux is slowly becoming a decent option, not so much because of linux improving leaps and bounds, so much as what happens on the windows side collapsing on its own. 10 years ago, I was used to that windows "of course" would have drivers available for stuff.

Difficult to asses whether it's overall a good or bad thing, but operatively speaking, WSL basically makes any machine a working Linux machine. The year of the linux machine arrived :)

Can the downvoters elaborate?

1. WSL is effectively Linux. 2. Most importantly, Linux support is mediocre at best (I owned 10+ laptops) - for developers who don't want to pull their hair on hardware incompatibilities, or want to be bound to a small part of the laptops/desktop parts, it's either that, or a Windows-only machine.

Fun (in a sad way) stuff: even the Ubuntu certification is a joke - Canonical is allowed to use customized versions of Ubuntu that they aren't required to release to the public; as a consequence, even hardware certified by Canonical as Ubuntu-compatible, can effectively be incompatible. I've been bitten by this twice.

Re: Review: Chuwi's $449 Unibook laptop is a funhouse-mirror MacBook Neo

#36

Post by bschwindHN »

card_zero wrote: post #33
bschwindHN wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like, your opinion man. The trackpad is a fantastic input device. I use it exclusively when on a laptop, and on a desktop I'll use both a mouse and a trackpad.

Hmm, a novel style. What determines which you use at any given time? Do you just switch back and forth at random to keep things interesting?

The mouse is better for precise pointing, and the trackpad is better for scrolling (especially horizontal), and multi-touch gestures.

Re: Review: Chuwi's $449 Unibook laptop is a funhouse-mirror MacBook Neo

#37

Post by alexpotato »

> Some others have had some success getting this stuff working, but it wasn’t something I spent much time on for this review.

One of the unexpected benefits of LLMs is that they make figuring out random Linux issues a breeze.

Personal story:

- I have a separate /home partition

- This means I can just re-install to the main / partition when I OS upgrade

- Re-install some packages and all of my configs from /home/.local, /home/.config etc all come back

This worked great for years but my Firefox kept using lots of CPU. Fire up a free LLM from OpenCode and it immediately figured out that I had a "blacklisted" GPU rendering FF config. This was most likely from when I had a non-GPU laptop. The LLM made a script to back up my config, remove the blacklisted config and then I was back up and running.

Re: Review: Chuwi's $449 Unibook laptop is a funhouse-mirror MacBook Neo

#38

Post by NuclearPM »

collabs wrote: post #31
varun_ch wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new Framework Pro laptop is supposed to be pretty good. Anyone have any experience with it yet?

I have not tried it myself and I'm skeptical of reviewers on the topic of touchpad. I remember sitting next to someone who seemed to be using Photoshop in a MacBook professionally like literally making fine edits with a cursor more than ten years ago. While I'm sure our track pads have gotten better, I doubt we have reached the level of Apple's track pads. I don't know how much of an accolade I can give a USD 2k+ dev…

You work for Framework?

Re: Review: Chuwi's $449 Unibook laptop is a funhouse-mirror MacBook Neo

#39

Post by jrm4 »

To go a bit broader -- has anyone else developed something like the following reaction: When I see reviews of anything that points at taking shots at one of the big boys, and the reaction is dismissive and negative -- I immediately doubt that reaction?

Like my near first instinct is "oh, you've scared high-industry big money players like Apple, such that they feel the need to put this down, I'm now curious that this thing might be -- and actually probably is -- pretty good? I will read further."

Re: Review: Chuwi's $449 Unibook laptop is a funhouse-mirror MacBook Neo

#40

Post by BoingBoomTschak »

freetonik wrote: post #3

>The Unibook’s keyboard is pretty good, and its trackpad is pretty bad. Just like 98% of non-Apple laptops. Amazing how after all these years nobody could replicate the feel of macbook's trackpads.

Don't agree here, I dislike my work M2 MBP's keyboards/trackpad.

The keyboard is bad because I have mostly known non-chiclet keyboards on old Thinkpad/Latitude so nothing against Apple per se, all current laptops are simply crap on that point.

But the trackpad, while quite smooth in tracking, can be infuriating when its Force Touch system has trouble registering clicks. Sure, it's better than clickpads, but compared to proper buttons? No thanks.

I guess coming from x61s, x200s and the like would make anyone a bit snobbish concerning laptop input devices (the only laptop I kept is an e6440).

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