Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Xiaomi’s first laptop is a Macbook Air rival

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 462 posts

Re: Xiaomi’s first laptop is a Macbook Air rival

#141

Post by RealGeek »

josteink wrote: post #35
puranjay wrote: post #8

People shit on Xiaomi here but even imitation requires some level of artistry and finesse. This looks like a good clone of Air, and I haven't seen Acer/Lenovo/Dell manage to do that yet.

> This looks like a good clone of Air, and I haven't seen Acer/Lenovo/Dell manage to do that yet. Clearly it's not a cheap product, but the Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1 is razor thin, high powered, well built, and very good looking. Maybe I'm missing something?

I have tried a bunch of Macbook Air competitors, but none of them have a trackpad as good as MacBook.

Re: Xiaomi’s first laptop is a Macbook Air rival

#142

Post by tinco »

mtgx wrote: post #52
anilgulecha wrote: post #4

If the RAM is user-upgradable, this will make for an excellent dev machine. Given it's a chinese laptop, it will surely not be locked, so Ubuntu will run well as well.

The $540 version uses Core M3, which basically has 15% lower performance than the latest iPad, so I doubt it's going to be too great of a dev machine (just because the iPad seems fast with 1 app per screen, doesn't mean the same performance will be enough for 20 tabs and 5 other programs running at the same time): http://www.extremetech.com/mobile/221881-apples-a9x-goes-hea...

What kind of development would we be talking about? I still use my 2009 MBP for day to day development. It's ~10% slower than a Core M3, I usually do webdev on it, but it's also fine for AOT things like Rust, Haskell and even some C here and there (I recently compiled RethinkDB, no biggy).

Things that really hurt are short battery life which is ~1.45hrs, and that it misses the modern CPU extensions which will obsolete it soon. Both of this issues obviously won't be present in a Core M3, so I see no reason why you wouldn't dev on an M3 unless you compile big native projects with great frequency.

Re: Xiaomi’s first laptop is a Macbook Air rival

#143

Post by fulafel »

im_dario wrote: post #41

I don't trust their battery run-times. I was looking for a laptop and finally settled down for a Lenovo Thinkpad 13. Thinkpad's battery is 42 Wh with a wifi surfing run-time of almost 7 hours [0], although it being sold as a 11 hours run-time. It hasn't a dedicated graphics chip. Xiaomi's battery is 40 Wh and it sports dedicated graphics. Macbook Air's battery is 58 Wh and it has integrated graphics, lasting around 1…

Laptops with discrete GPUs tend to have an integrated GPU as well, and keep the discrete GPU powered off most of the time. The 30W you quoted is the maximum power consumption for the discrete GPU, when it is active and running at full tilt.

Re: Xiaomi’s first laptop is a Macbook Air rival

#144

Post by dr1337 »

MichaelGG wrote: post #77
merb wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pretty naive. especially since it has a dual graphics with nvidia. which is really akward to "correctly" install on linux. and then there are drivers. pretty sure that there won't be many stuff that directly works on linux.

Use Windows for the metal OS, then run Linux on top (VMware or WSL). Best of both worlds.

Or just wait for Windows 10 Redstone on Aug 2 and run the Bash on Linux Subsystem for Windows. No overhead and you get full speed with unmodified debs.

Re: Xiaomi’s first laptop is a Macbook Air rival

#145

Post by dr1337 »

Razengan wrote: post #128
d_j_b wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the power management never quite works as it should

Neither does Windows' power management come close to the hours/work you can squeeze out of OS X on a Mac.

Yeah but the Macs either come with gimped AMD GPUs or integrated GPUs.

Re: Xiaomi’s first laptop is a Macbook Air rival

#146

Post by blisterpeanuts »

The Techcrunch article reads more like a blog or opinion piece. For example: "...it’ll be interesting to see how many units Xiaomi ships."

Also, no mention of battery life, which is the sine qua non of laptops. Unless I missed it, and I read the article twice to be sure.

I'm always sorry when I click on a TC link.

Here's Engadget's take, and they do mention the 9.5 hour battery: https://www.engadget.com/2016/07/27/xiaomi-mi-notebook-air-l...

Re: Xiaomi’s first laptop is a Macbook Air rival

#147

Post by nickjj »

andycjw wrote: post #91
knotty66 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a cheap, lightweight development laptop I use a Toshiba Chromebook 2 (2015) with a 240GB SSD fitted. Build quality is not up to Apple standards but is still decent. Screen is much, much better than Macbook Air screen though. Battery life is very good. I use Arch Linux and With a bit of tweaking, everything works (bluetooth, wifi, keyboard backlight, suspend/resume etc). I can also dual boot into ChromeOS which is…

I can only find Toshiba Chromebook 2 with 16GB SSD onboard, how did you get 240GB SSD fitted?

You can buy http://amzn.to/2a4isAQ [0] and swap it in. This model is compatible with the Chromebook you mentioned. It's about $50 for the 128GB SSD expansion.

[0] Yes this is an affiliate link through my Amazon account.

Re: Xiaomi’s first laptop is a Macbook Air rival

#149

Post by zaroth »

fapjacks wrote: post #114
scotu wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot trust Lenovo being competent at what they do after superfish, I wonder how can any of the readers of hacker news still think of buying from them... (this doesn't mean that competitors are competent or anything, but being caught like they were undermines my basic trust threshold)

That's easy: Who cares what Lenovo installs on their hardware? Whatever is on there is coming off as soon as I get it. And their hardware is excellent for the price.

I think the thing with Lenovo is, their hardware is sometimes excellent for the price. It's like they are Intel with a tick-tock cadence except the ticks are all complete duds. Just make sure to wait for a new model to accumulate at least 6 months of solid reviews before pulling the trigger.

I've been getting ThinkPads on corporate refresh cycles for 15 years and after they sold to Lenovo, I never know if a new machine will turn out to be a flaky piece of junk or totally solid and well built. Seems like it's always one or the other.

Re: Xiaomi’s first laptop is a Macbook Air rival

#150

Post by josteink »

Trundle wrote: post #55
josteink wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This looks like a good clone of Air, and I haven't seen Acer/Lenovo/Dell manage to do that yet. Clearly it's not a cheap product, but the Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1 is razor thin, high powered, well built, and very good looking. Maybe I'm missing something?

An Air clone to me would have a metal body as that's a pretty defining characteristic.

For me the important aspect of an "Air laptop" would be that it is lightweight.

And Carbon Fibre is certainly more lightweight than aluminium, and may be stronger as well. As such, the Carbon X1 certainly qualifies.

Post reply on HN