Puff piece aside, Xiaomi is one of the Chinese brands that are usable outside the country. Their Snapdragon based Mi flagships are lightweight (lots of plastic

Puff piece aside, Xiaomi is one of the Chinese brands that are usable outside the country. Their Snapdragon based Mi flagships are lightweight (lots of plastic around a thin metallic frame, which in my opinion is the sensible way to design a phone) with good screens and crappy cameras. The LineageOS port is well developed and has been my daily device for about a year now. Installing LineageOS was trivial once you unlocked the bootloader, which was the only roadblock since the instructions were outdated, but at no point required reading Chinese. It involved giving them a phone number that could receive SMS but a temporary number and throwaway email worked. People joke about how much spyware is on the phone, which is a possbility, but outside the application processor I fail to see why there would be more than other manufacturers. Their Intel based Macbook clones are also well built and runs Debian sid without any surprises. This is probably how the Chinese brands will move up the value chain in the western hemisphere. Not by launching new brands but by direct consumer sales to people who buy from digital marketplaces anyway.