Xiaomi officially working on its first laptop

Recently, there were reports of Chinese company Xiaomi – popular for its smartphones – working towards a new laptop range.

Since Xiaomi borrows heavily from Apple in terms of design, the range of laptops are expected to take on Apple’s Macbook range. In an interview with Taipei Times, Richard Lee, Chairman of Inventec Corp confirmed that his company is making the first notebook computer product for Xiaomi in China.

Quoting Lee, the report added, that a subsidiary “Inventec Appliance Corp, which assembles Xiaomi’s smartphones, is to jointly design and manufacture the Chinese company’s first notebook products in Inventec’s plants in China.”

In the interview, Lee also confirmed that shipping of  Xiaomi’s notebook computers would commence in “the first or second quarter of next year”.

It had been reported that Xiaomi will most likely go with a 15-inch notebook size and will bundle the laptops with Linux OS. Approximate price points of the notebook are speculated to be in the CNY 2,999 region which roughly translates to Rs 31,500.

 

According to leaks, the Xiaomi laptop looks like the Macbook Air. Image: GizmoChina

If you have followed Xiaomi since its entry into India, there were speculations of it releasing a laptop in the past as well. It has also been speculated over the past few months that the Xiaomi laptops would ship with Linux. However, since the launch of Windows 10, we wonder if Xiaomi has been working with Microsoft to launch the devices with the latest version of Windows operating system.

GizmoChina had leaked images of what appeared to be a Xiaomi laptop along with the specifications. Calling it the Xiaomi Notebook, on first glance one couldn’t help but notice the uncanny resemblance to the Apple MacBook Air. In terms of specs, this alleged laptop from Xiaomi was to sport a 15-inch full HD display , would be powered by an Intel Core i7-4500U chip. It would come with two 8GB RAM modules, taking the total RAM to 16GB. The price point of this laptop was expected to be under $499 which is approximately Rs 32,000.

According to a report by Bloomberg, it was also reported that Xiaomi has been in talks with Samsung to use memory chips and displays for laptops.