Xiaomi has gained much popularity for its extensive range of products which cater to everyone at an inexpensive price. The Chinese Manufacturer has now also stepped into the laptop industry with their very own notebook: The Xiaomi Mi Notebook Pro.
To put in plain, if you ever wondered if Apple starts producing laptops with Windows, then, believe it or not, the Xiaomi Mi Notebook Pro would be a perfect fit, because of its design and performance. Xiaomi isn’t totally new in the laptop industry since they also have a couple of other laptops to their name; The Xiaomi Mi Notebook Air 13.3 (2017) and the Xiaomi Air 12. Though, Xiaomi still should be considered a major phone manufacturer rather than a laptop one. But then again Apple is the same no?
Design
The laptop boasts a modern design and uses a darker shade of gray. The color known as “Deep gray” gives an elegant look and feel to the laptop. Most laptops you would find on the shelf are usually colored in metallic silver. Therefore, in the case you need a break on such kind of design, perhaps you should have another look at the design features too.
Instead of offering an aggressive look, with angles here and there, the laptop looks perfectly rectangular, which adds to professionalism. Although there are slight curves, the laptop dimensions being 360 x 244 x 15mm, it certainly caters to professional use. Though, you won’t find it too portable with such large display size. On top of that, the weight of 2 kg might also be too much for you to handle.
Therefore those looking for portability should perhaps give a quick glance at the Mi NoteBook Air which costs less and is also about one-third lighter. The major difference between the two is in the number of available ports and size.
On the laptop lid, there isn’t the usual manufacturer logo found on most other laptops. Instead, the logo is on the opposite side; You would have to flip the laptop to see it. There are five rubber feet there as well as a pair of speaker grills. Not only this, but the vents are also there as well, so you might feel that your legs might be getting warmer.
The laptop houses a 15.6-inch display which is supported by a long single hinge. This reminds us of the usual Apple laptops which also have a single hinge. Though surprisingly, the display is protected by a Corning Gorilla Glass which is rather unusual considering the fact that the laptop doesn’t feature a touchscreen.
Ports
The laptop has a number of ports. On the left side, there is a usual full-sized HDMI port for you to connect your laptop to an external display. There are also a couple of USB Type-A connectors and around that is an audio jack. While on the right side, there are two USB Type-C connectors though one of them is for power only. If you need to insert an SD card there is an SD card slot too. On the top right-hand side of the device, there is the power button, though to be honest, it isn’t one of the most convenient places to choose.
Keyboard and Trackpad
The benefit of choosing a large screen display laptop is that they usually have keyboards with dedicated numpads too. On the contrary, this laptop still doesn’t have a dedicated numpad which is disappointing. Though, the benefit is that the keys are full-sized, and have a low activation force. The travel is short at 1.5mm which can increase your typing speed a lot. Disappointingly once again, there isn’t any double key functionality either.
Although the keyboard is backlit and has an on/off button, it still doesn’t make up for what it is missing.
The trackpad though, on the other hand, is large and also has a fingerprint reader. Again, there aren’t any physical buttons for left and right click. This may again be a cause of dismay to some.
Specifications
The Specifications are where the Xiaomi Mi NoteBook Pro might have an edge. It is one of the few laptops out there which has the Dolby Atmos sound technology. Used with the Harman Kardon Infinity speakers which are inbuilt, the sound quality is great.
Another thing is that it was amongst the first laptops to have the currently latest generation of Intel processor: The 8th Generation. The Core i5 version of the laptop boasts an Intel 8520U processor, which gives a significant performance increase compared to previous generation laptops since the processor is now quad-core instead of dual core. The processor also supports multi-threading.
With a base-frequency of 1.6 GHz which can go up to 3.4 GHz courtesy Turbo-Boost, combined with 6 MB of cache and 8 GB DDR4, it is suitable for every person in the work field. The graphics have also improved since then since it features an Intel UHD 620, and also has a dedicated graphics card too which is switched automatically. The Nvidia GeForce MX150 has a 2 GB DDR5 video memory which can play most of the average games. This auto-switching saves on battery, when the dedicated one isn’t required.
Battery
The battery lasts out a decent 7 hours and 22 minutes, courtesy the 61Whr 4-cell battery. Yes, the MacBook Pro lasts out much longer, but then again, it costs that much too. Speaking of that, let’s come to the price.
Price
The Xiaomi Mi Notebook Pro is available for a price tag of 5599 yuan (about $850) for an i5 model with 8GB of RAM, which goes up to 6999 yuan (about $1070) for an i7 model with 16GB of RAM and Nvidia’s entry-level GeForce MX150 GPU.
Considering that this is pretty less compared to the Apple MacBook Pro, for those under a budget, perhaps this could be their best option.