Isn't this the company that released press photos of a phone whose camera --- the actual supposed real-life physical camera --- was the icon from Apple's photo app?
This is just a laptop from an unknown Chinese OEM with a Mi logo (poorly) Photoshopped onto it. http://www.kakatech.com/i5-14inch-laptop-k18/ The source of the rumor is Gizmochina, which has basically no reputation for authenticity whatsoever.
Have ear buds from Xiaomi and been very impressed with quality for price. I'm somewhat sceptical they are going to put a $400 dollar cpu and 16gb of ram into a laptop that costs under $500 dollars though. Maybe they are getting a good price on the haswells now that broadwell production is ramping up.
I have used several Xiaomi products (phone, box, MIUI). I can say their product design and quality are very good. Obviously, they copied hardware design from Apple, but they have proved that they can build high quality products at very low prices, and they are selling phones, tablets, TV boxes, real TVs, earphones, routers. Very few companies in the world can achieve it (Google tried it and didn't go anywhere, remember Nexus Q). It is only matter of time Xiaomi to catch up on their original design capability.
For reference, Smartisan T1 had very good product design. It was done by a English teacher founder with less than $20M funding. All it took was to find a good design firm to help out. While I don't like their copycat, but they are very likely to succeed in the long run.
Big +1 on the Smartisan (锤子). I really like their interface. The Smartisan OS is one of the most thoughtfully and beautifully designed Android systems that I've seen.
I'm willing to bet that this (at least the stated price) is completely fake. There is no way that laptop can sell for $480, that won't even cover the cost of the components. Heck, that processor alone probably costs $200 from Intel.
No way the price can be that affordable for those specifications; the OEMs would either be getting screwed or Xiaomi is making close to nothing on each machine.
I would find the latter plausible if they weren't already set to dominate the market upon release. This would simply be a move to assert brand dominance and squeeze everyone else out of the market.
Xiaomi doesn't have to factor in IP rights and R&D, that keeps costs down. I doubt, however, that "stealing" from Apple is a viable business model in the long term.
You seem to have been downvoted because people forgot how every Samsung phone was an iPhone rip-off on one way or another. Also their first tablets and even the use of Apple icons at their shops decorations.
It may not be anymore and that's the point of the comments thread: Great way to bootstrap your business. Once up and running with profits you can go your own way.
Not really. While some of the software UI looks similar. The hardware is pretty unique. Have you ever held a Xiaomi before? I own both a Mi 2s and Mi 3; the hardware and software experience is really quite different from Apple. (And most of the rest of the Android ecosystem for that matter.) The "copycat" claims are overblown.
I've been hearing more and more about this company all of a sudden. Started last month when i was looking for a new fitness band and saw that theirs is super cheap - only $13. Even if it only lasts a month it'll be worth the money given that my $150 fitbit only lasted 6 months before falling apart.
I've been using a Xiaomi M4 (Android phone) for the last months. So far so good. I think Xiaomi is creating attractive products at a low price point (don't know if they are infringing IPs though). I posted more detailed information about my Xiaomi experience here: http://towp8.com/2014/12/24/switching-from-ios-to-android-my...
I'm looking at their headphones right now and shipping seems to be a huge problem. $20 for the headphones but ~$15 to ship to the US. Are any of their products sold in the US with cheaper shipping?
The first comment or the first paragraph of any article about Xiaomi is always how much they copied from Apple. I don't see it, it looks like any other laptop, there are laptops from HP/Dell/Acer that look more like an MBP than this does. Same goes for Xiaomi phones.
I'm sure they got a lot of inspiration from Apple and several places, so does every company, but this "blatant copiers!" reaction is a headline in every single Xiaomi article from every news site i've ever read. I'm not sure how much of this reaction is legitimate and how much of it is just corporate sentamentalism from Americans and/or apple-owners.
I have yet to find a good Linux laptop. Mind you, my problem is not the hardware, it's battery life under Linux. Even out-of-the-box Windows has better battery life than my best configured Linux.
Oh, TLP looks interesting. To be fair, I haven't used Linux on a laptop (outside of a VM) for the last 3 years so the landscape might have changed quite a bit.
In my experience, Ubuntu 14.04 has pretty decent battery life on laptops as long as they use fairly standard chipsets and don't use fancy graphics switching between embedded and dedicated gpus. You shouldn't need to use TLP or do much hackery.
But to avoid heartache, I definitely recommend using a laptop where the vendor supports Linux drivers etc. I've had good experiences with the driver support with recent system76 laptops.
Kind of sad that was actually one of my initial concerns in even seeing this... Of course I get similar concerns wrt the U.S. gov't and Cisco products everywhere...
