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Xiaomi Mi Air 13.3in Notebook Review
- elcct 10y agoLow res screen and only 8GB of RAM, kind of a deal breaker for me.
- refrigerator 10y agoCurious about your 'low res screen' comment - 1080p on a 13.3" screen seems plenty to me!
- zapu 10y agoI agree. Not quite "retina" but almost too high DPI for unscaled Windows.
- rayiner 10y agoWindows scaling has gotten good enough where it'd be a deal-breaker for me to purchase a notebook without a "retina" screen. Especially when you're talking about a notebook pushing $1000.
- izym 10y agoI think that depends very much on the suite of apps you use. There's plenty of apps where the scaling is rather broken and seriously takes away from the experience.
- elcct 10y agoIt is passable for a phone, but if you do something more productive than browsing the web or watching youtube, 1080p is definitely not an economical use of the space. QHD+ is absolute minimum in terms of how much information you can display.
- QuantumRoar 10y agoI owned one of the 2014 or 2015 Macbook Pro 13" thingies. Its effective resolution was 720p. That information density is so low that I couldn't use it. Using the full resolution, things were too small. Anything in between was unusable since the GPU couldn't render the OS animations smoothly. Is your eyesight just so good that you can use the non-scaled versions?
- op00to 10y agoThere's a wide range of scaled resolutions with the retina MBPs. I usually go somewhere in the middle to high resolution space. My brain can't handle the jaggies I see when I use my MacBook Air 13" now.
- QuantumRoar 10y agoAbout two years ago or so, when I bought a 13" MBP, they had an intermediate resolution setting. But the OS started to lag und stutter when I switched between virtual desktops (I think it's called workspace). I believe this is because they render at double the effective resolution and then scale down. Therefore, the intermediate settings are the most taxing for the GPU. I couldn't find a way to disable the animations and since I use virtual desktops a lot and the usual effective 720p resolution is almost comically large, it all added up to be a dealbreaker for me and I returned it.
- croon 10y ago1080p on a 13.3 inch supports as much text as I can reasonably read on that size. Any higher resolution would just draw more battery and result in me having to scale up to compensate. And I have "perfect" vision. If I'm doing something "more productive"/work I just connect more monitors. Resolution is only relevant up to a point, then screen size takes over. I'm honestly unsure if I can even spot the difference between 1080p and 1440p on a 5.5" phone in a blind test (ironic phrasing). Have you tried? I would love to have higher resolution on screens 24" and up without paying out the nose for 4k (1440p is reasonable in pricing), but the escalating resolutions in phones in recent years was just ridiculous, and fortunately it seems to have stopped now, and OP3 at least stopped at 1080p and focused on other hardware.
- bryanlarsen 10y ago165 PPI is low resolution? That's almost the same as a 4K screen @ 27 inches. Would you call that low resolution? That's "retina" at a 21 inch (53 cm) viewing distance. Once you hit "retina", increasing the resolution provides rapidly decreasing benefits. http://isthisretina.com/ http://isthisretina.com/
- elcct 10y agoYou can display more information using 4K @ 27 inch than 1080p @ 13.3, so not sure what is your point? I have 4k 27 inch monitor as well and can easily see pixels.
- criddell 10y agoWould you use a laser printer that prints at 165 PPI? Edit: Rather than vote the question down, what's a reasonable answer? I work with text all day and would love for my display to produce text as sharp as my laser printer does.
- bryanlarsen 10y agoDPI & PPI aren't directly comparable. Displays have three display elements per pixel, and printers have a considerable amount of random variation.
- criddell 10y agoThey aren't directly comparable, but they are comparable. A 500 DPI printer is going to produce better text on an A4 page than a 1 PPI A4 sized display, right? Do you think text on your 165 PPI display is as sharp as even a low end laser printer?
- bryanlarsen 10y agoMy 175 PPI screen is sharper than a 300 DPI laser printer, and way sharper than 300 DPI ink jet printer.
- dilemma 10y agoIn China, this about half the price of a Macbook Air and a third the price of a Macbook Pro (or something like that - correct me.) Definitely a good deal.
- dexterdog 10y agoWhere did you see that. The only price I saw was 867 euro which is much more than I was expecting for something like this. Aren't Macbook Airs about 800 euro?
- jorgemf 10y ago> Aren't Macbook Airs about 800 euro? we wish... the cheapest Macbook air is 999€ -> http://www.apple.com/es/macbook-air/ http://www.apple.com/es/macbook-air/
- mdasen 10y agoThe MacBook Air on Apple's site includes taxes/VAT. The Xiaomi Mi Air's price of €867 doesn't include that (or even shipping). Given that a MacBook Air has nearly €200 in VAT alone, the MacBook Air is "about €800" (specifically €825 in Spain, exclusive of VAT). There also might be other fees given that the Irish price of a MacBook Air is €29 more than the Spanish. It's hard to compare the price of a MacBook Air with VAT and with regulatory compliance taken care of to a Mi Air without those. I think it's a little more fair to compare it to buying a US-sourced MacBook Air which starts at €826 and the 13" can be had for €918 (exclusive of VAT and shipping). That's the same ballpark as €867 for a Mi Air and the MacBook is going to have an EU Declaration of Conformity. Once we're talking about importing a laptop from China, we might as well compare it to a laptop imported from the US when talking about price. Heck, import it from the UK. In the UK, the MacBook Air is €842 for the 11" and €1,011 for the 13" inclusive of VAT (and since the UK is still in the EU, you can move it to Spain legally without paying VAT). If we assume €175 of VAT on the Mi Air, that makes the Mi Air €1,042 which is slightly more than a 13" MacBook Air. For those that say that the Mi Air has more RAM or a newer processor, I'm guessing Apple is going to rectify that on Thursday and that makes a more apt comparison given that this is new and we know Apple has (desperately needed) new models coming.
- StavrosK 10y agoGiven how satisfied I am by my other Xiaomi products, I think I will replace my Macbook Air with this.
- a012 10y agoCuriously, can I run Linux/*nix on it?
- StavrosK 10y agoThat's what I want to know as well. It's kind of a non-starter for me if it doesn't run Ubuntu.
- pizza234 10y agoOn reddit they say it almost works ok: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/53s477/xiaomi_mi_notebook_air_133_linux/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/53s477/xiaomi_mi_not...
- tdkl 10y agoSomeone on reddit says he runs W10/Elementary in dualboot and it works fine: https://www.reddit.com/r/Xiaomi/comments/58y3d9/i_have_the_mi_notebook_air_133_english_win10_ama/d945inb/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Xiaomi/comments/58y3d9/i_have_the_m...
- jasonkester 10y agoI was just thinking this morning how my ideal laptop would be an exact replica of my Macbook Pro 13, but with a sensible keyboard and Windows 10. This gets so close. It even has a real honest to jeebus Delete key. But then it punts on pageup/pagedn/home/end, leaving them as the terrible modified arrow keys that ruin Macs for me. Fix that (and give it 32gb ram and a 1TB hard drive like a real computer) and I want one.
- lj3 10y agoDidn't you just describe the Lenovo x1 carbon?
- imron 10y agoThe ctrl key also seems in a bad place if you're the kind of person who uses keyboard shortcuts a lot e.g. ctrl-c, ctrl-x and ctrl-v will all involve significant hand movements to achieve.
- crishoj 10y agoRemapping CAPS LOCK as CTRL is the first thing I do when setting up a new laptop.
- criddell 10y agoME TOO. CAPS LOCK IS THE KIND OF KEY YOU REALLY ONLY NEED TO HIT ONCE EVERY TIME YOU RESTART. THE CONTROL KEY IS USED MUCH MORE FREQUENTLY.
- pritambaral 10y agoWhy do you need to hit the CapsLock key when you restart?
- criddell 10y agoYOU'RE RIGHT. I SHOULD SCRIPT THAT.
- Jugurtha 10y agoLooks interesting. I have a Dell Latitude E6320 (my second one because they're great). Here are the features that are cool in my opinion: * SIM card slot for 3G (remove battery to place and forget). * Magnesium & aluminum. * Very good plastics for keyboard (short travel for digits, springy, dense, slightly concave). * 180° opening (you can set it flat, very practical). * HDD removable without opening the case. 4 small screws and the HDD is free, you just have to pull it to disconnect. Very useful. You just plug it back and screw. * DVD drive removable without screws. You just press a mechanism and pull the drive from the laptop. * SD reader. * Ability to pop out the keyboard without opening the case, for cleaning. * Hardware switch to kill wireless card (because turning it off and back on again is just one of those things you'll still have in flying cars). * Can install a 'double battery' instead of the normal one. * It's 13.3". This size is great. It's not a 12", which I find small and it's not a 14" which I find big (my laptop goes with me everywhere in all positions). I find these features very desirable, hence my reluctance to buy other laptops (can't use Lenovo / Dell Inspiron / HP Pavillion to save my life.). I haven't checked their XPS series yet.
- vinay427 10y agoI find the business machines in today's market far above any consumer devices including the MacBook (Pro) in durability, reliability, expandability, etc. I have a ThinkPad and haven't found the need to switch to something with a poor quality hinge (e.g. MBP), poor quality keyboard (in my opinion almost everything except a ThinkPad), poor expandability (again almost every non-business machine), etc.
- Jugurtha 10y agoPeople who work in auto shops love the ThinkPad to the point it's probably the only model they buy. It's the AK-47 of laptops. It apears there's little dogfooding in products, whether laptops or cars. Design flaws that just nag you right from the first use that make you wonder if people who work at laptop or car manufacturers use laptops and drive cars.
- mrmondo 10y agoReading this on mine right now! The good: - Cheap as anything! - Internal build quality seems decent. - Decent screen for the money. - Keyboard is nice. - Touchpad is better than most Dell, HP etc... laptops I've tried, not as nice as a Macbook though. - Runs well, very snappy, I boot to to my linux (Solus) desktop in about 2.5 seconds on average with full disk encryption (excluding me entering the password). - Very standard hardware, Intel everything pretty much except the additional nvidia graphics card I'm yet to get working in Linux The bad: - The aluminium used compared to say the base model Macbook is crap, the slightest thing and it scratches / gets dirty. - You cant upgrade the RAM. - It's heavy, it's a lot thicker than the Macbook. - Two annoying linux problems (regardless of distro, kernel): 1. Switching between integrated intel graphics to nvidia is a pain in the ass, even with bumblebee it's awful. 2. Wifi, looks like it doesn't work, but it does! Just keep enabling it in network-manager it'll take like 5-10 times and then it'll be on and fine. Otherwise everything in linux such as sound, nvme, trim, etc... all works perfectly.
- cylinder 10y agoThank you for sharing.
- mrmondo 10y agoOh, no problems, thanks for saying thanks! If you have any questions feel free to ask and when I notice my comments I'll reply.
- Spooks 10y agoI was wondering how the touchpad/keyboard compares to the mac? The reviewer said it works great in comparison to many other Windows touchpads, just wondering how it stacks against mac
- mrmondo 10y agoThe keyboard is the best laptop keyboard I've typed on OTHER than a Macbook Pro / Macbook (I like both the high and low profile keys in different ways) which I think still are the best I've used. The touchpad is SO much better than most windows laptop touchpads, even smooth movement, good 'finger texture' (never thought I'd say that!) in linux current with the new libinput replacing the synaptics driver two finger right click only works on touching the pad with two fingers, not with clicking the pad with two fingers, but I haven't looked at it as it doesn't bother me at all.
- gnipgnip 10y agoAs an aside, do folk run Linux on a Mac ?
- rocky1138 10y agoWriting this reply from Kubuntu on a MBP.
- rocky1138 10y agoIs anyone else irrationally worried about Chinese backdoors in this product?
- mtw 10y ago8GB only is a dealbreaker. Also would have loved a Thunderbolt. Hope they sell a lot of this and release a pro version or similar