We keep hearing that Xiaomi is working on a laptop. In December last year, there were even a few photos of a device floating on the web that some bloggers claimed was a Xiaomi laptop prototype. Now, a laptop maker in Taiwan has confirmed that Xiaomi is indeed working on a laptop and is likely to launch in early next year.
Richard Lee, chairman of Inventec that makes devices for other companies, has said that his firm was working with Xiaomi on a laptop. "We will start shipping Xiaomi's notebook computers in the first or second quarter of next year," Lee told the Taipei Times.
He said that Xiaomi would follow the same model for laptops that it uses for smartphones. This means the company would put up good hardware inside machines that are sleek and well-designed but at the same time, will probably price them aggressively.
However, this strategy is also fraught with the risk. While there is a lot of room to improve the laptop experience, unlike smartphones, laptops are already low-margin products for most companies. Hence, it will be interesting to see how aggressively Xiaomi can price its laptop in a market where low prices are already a reality.
Currently, we do not know much about Xiaomi's upcoming laptop. However, if the images leaked last year are any indication, it is possible that Xiaomi's laptop may look similar to MacBook Air. It has also been speculated that Xiaomi's laptop would not run on Windows. Instead, it would use a modified version of Android, similar to how the company's phone use MiUI, an operating system that is based on Android.
The Taipei Times report noted that Inventec, which assembles Xiaomi's smartphones, will "jointly design and manufacture" Xiaomi's first notebook in Inventec's plants in China.
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