There’s a thing my friends have noticed about me: I buy laptops. It’s the thing I do, more than anything else, that makes me subject to capitalism. (Well … there’s also phones. No comment.) The last few years have been a bit of a slowdown, though. I had a Macbook Air M1 and a Macbook Pro, and ended up selling them because of the lack of customizability. After trying a few other laptops that didn’t work for various reasons, I got a Surface Laptop 7, which I’ve used as my main laptop for a good year. It’s fantastic, but there are some software compatibility issues I’ve run into that have made it a little more frustrating than I’d like … and now the Framework Laptop 12 is coming out, so I made plans to switch to that. But then (then!) I put a bid on this laptop on eBay called the Chuwi Minibook X. And my bid was accepted, even though it dropped the price … really low. It arrived here and I’ve used it for four days, so here are my current thoughts on this laptop, which I would rate as ‘surprisingly good’:
- The keyboard is cramped. It works, it’s the best you could possibly do in the form factor, but still. Not really a fan, sadly.
- It doesn’t open one-handed, but it feels very satisfying to open and close.
- The touchscreen isn’t amazing, but it’s acceptable.
- The battery life is 4-5 hours for me, with it idling in front of me playing light games on Windows. (It gives off much less heat on Ubuntu, and everything works immediately aside from the grub screen being sideways, so I’ll probably do that for a bit.)
- All of the apps I’ve tried work (including ableton!). I wouldn’t do heavy editing on it of course, but it doesn’t feel slow if you’re not stressing it out.
- The case is some sort of metal. It feels great. The keyboard backlight is even to my eyes, the screen is good enough and pretty sharp. The 2-in-1 capability is nice.
- It’s so small. This whole laptop is lighter and smaller than my 11” ipad pro and magic keyboard, which is what I was bringing with me before.
- And it was $200??? How?
This isn’t going to be my forever laptop unless I do some amazing job of adjusting … The kayboard is just too small and it bothers me. But it’s great, and I wish I could keep using it. I’ll try for a bit longer, anyways. And for the money … I don’t know what’s better.
… Anyways. That was totally unrelated to anything, but here are my thoughts on a very small piece of tech.
… While I have you, one other thing: I just saw K-Pop Demonslayers, and as a result I’ve been trying to sing ‘Free’ for an hour. Great songs in that movie. It’s just a good time(tm).